Birds of a Feather, Sort Of

Photos
Panama's For the Birds
Animal lovers bask in a bird's-eye view of Panama's vibrant winged inhabitants.

Canopy Tower promised to be an intense few days. On the chalkboard next to the front door, someone had written, "Birding boot camp."

And I was definitely a civilian. On our first afternoon, before the king vulture sighting, I eavesdropped a bit on a group of guests as they compared notes and bird books. One said, "The only way to tell the difference is that it has . . ."

I stopped listening, because I knew the sentence was bound to end with something like "a buff throat instead of an ivory breast."

Bird-watching sounds simple enough. You see a bird. You watch it. But it's actually more like bird identifying. When you see a bird, you have to determine what species it is. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, it doesn't count.

And it's not enough to say, "Ooh, it's a woodpecker!" There are eight kinds of woodpeckers on the list of birds seen in the vicinity of Canopy Tower.

You think you know what a toucan looks like? There are four kinds on that list. It turns out that the one on the cereal box is a keel-billed toucan. The big rainbow-colored beak is a bit of a giveaway, but if you can't see that, the bird book says you can tell it apart from a chestnut-mandibled toucan because it has "black, not dark brown body feathering." Of course.

While it's all about the birds, what you see depends on who's watching. Our fellow guests the first day were serious birders. The vulture-spotter and her husband, both Canadians, had been at the tower for a week. A group of about a half-dozen U.S. retirees had been there several days as part of a longer tour of Panamanian bird spots.

How serious were they? Late that afternoon during a hike, as mosquitoes buzzed around us in the broiling sun, a prolonged disagreement broke out about what kind of swallow we were seeing. One kind has a distinct band across the breast. The other has an indistinct band.

"That's indistinct at best," one man observed solemnly.

Oh, my. This could be worse than I had thought, and there weren't many other options. The lodge's Web site lists some possibilities for non-birders, but they all come down to one thing: Leave, whether it's to tour the canal or to shop in Panama City.

And I couldn't just hang out at the pool, because there isn't one. Canopy Tower isn't a luxe resort, even though the cost is astronomical by Central American standards. Meals are healthy and ample, but not gourmet. The rooms are clean and pleasant, with hot water and electricity, but most are small. There's no air conditioning and no elevator.

Sleeping in wasn't an option, either. The metal walls and floors of the tower carry sound remarkably well, and when people are up with the birds, that's really, really early.