Xenornis

Rosabel & Karl Kaufmann and Darién Montañez spent the better part of the last two weeks chasing after their 600th year birds in Western Panama. First stop on November 3 was the marsh at Las Lajas beach, where the highlight was a calling Gray-breasted Crake . We then headed to the Fortuna area, which we birded out of the ANAM sation in Palo Seco. We got to Chiriquí Grande at dusk, right in time to coax responses from a pair of  Uniform Crakes by the Two Tanks Road dump. November 4 began at Continental Divide Trail, which had the usual big mixed flocks interspersed with long periods of birdless quiet, and produced Black-thighed Grosbeak, Rufous-breasted Antthrush and Rufous-rumped Antwren. The access road beyond the trailhead is now paved [map], and dives into Palo Seco all the way down to a Petroterminales pumping station at 725m. A stop at around 900m got us Black-headed Nightingale-Thrush , White-crowned Manakin , and Blue-and-gold Tanager. Verrugosa Trail [ map ] is stil...

Last week I joined three different birding journeys in the western side of the country. We began by returning to the Velasquez farm on two occasions with several members of SAP looking for Azuero Parakeet, and got some more pictures, videos and interesting details about this seldom seen endemic bird. During my visit in April there were hundreds of Brown-throated Parakeets in the forest edge and trees in the pasture, the same area that the Azuero Parakeets are using now, however we could only see a single Brown-throated Parakeet in the area. Itzel Fong pointed that some birds have a white eye ring while other have a browner eye ring. I also noted some birds with brown irises and some few had brilliant orange iris. One of the birds had a tiny blue spot in the forehead right above the bill. There were about 60 birds feeding at the fig tree; 4 times more birds than the previous week. The parakeets were doing a lot of grooming and pair bonding activities which we filmed. I also spotted wh...

Over the weekend, Bill Adsett, Rafael Cortez and Jan Cubilla visited Fortuna and nearby Chiriquí Grande. They had some very interesting sightings, such as Lattice-tailed Trogon , Strong-billed Woodcreeper , Rufous-rumped Antwren , at least 9 or 10 Rufous-breasted Antthrush on the Continental Divide Trail, of which 3 seen well; Black-and-white Becard , a female Bare-necked Umbrellabird observed for 15 minutes on the trail behind IRHE station; Black-thighed Grosbeak , and Sooty-faced Finch . They even saw a puma crossing the road at night about 100 yds from the vivero.