What happened to the view? It is 5.30 am and I am first up on the deck, binoculars in one hand and field guide in the other. But yesterday’s breathtaking forest panorama has been swallowed by a peasouper. Perhaps I should have stayed in bed.
Happily, the mist hasn’t fazed the birds. The branches of the cecropia tree immediately below me are already aflutter with tanagers and euphonias. And as my eyes adjust to the murk, I make out others: a black-cheeked woodpecker bounding up the trunk; a jaunty party of collared aracaris brandishing finger-length fruit like Groucho Marx cigars in their outsized bills.
Backstage, meanwhile, the awakening forest cranks up the soundtrack: the whine of the cicadas clicks in as though at the flick of a switch, while a keel-billed toucan starts up its comb-rasping “krrit, krrit” and a giant tinamou whistles mournfully from the depths. And from further down the slopes a throaty roaring swells the mist like a cross-channel foghorn.
“Howler monkeys,” confirms my guide Alexis Sanchez, seeing me start at this unearthly noise. He has materialised discreetly alongside me and is readying his telescope for the dawn vigil. “It’s territorial,” he says. “They start every day like this.”
Soon my companions are emerging through the hatch, cradling coffee cups as they take up familiar positions. After four days, our pre-breakfast routine is as territorial as any forest primate’s. With the sun burning off the mist, revealing on one horizon a silver ribbon of canal and on the other the gleaming towers of the distant capital, the sightings come thick and fast: red-tailed squirrel to the right; squirrel cuckoo to the left. We cluster around Alex, jostling for a glimpse of whatever he’s captured in his scope.
For the three-toed sloth suspended just below me, however, there are no such histrionics. This same individual was on the exact same branch yesterday. As I watch, one shaggy limb extends in t’ai chi slow-mo towards a neighbouring branch. Grappling-hook claws clutch briefly at empty air then, as if on reflection, return to their original grip. Why move to branch two, after all, when branch one still has leaves enough for another morning’s munching?
So began day four at the Canopy Tower, Panama’s most celebrated wildlife-watching bolt-hole. Perched atop the forested Semaphore Hill in Soberanía National Park, just outside Panama City, this incongruous lighthouse-like structure was once a US radar station. Local conservationist Raúl Arias has since converted it into an ingenious wildlife facility that doubles as research station and tourist lodge. Inside, the living quarters retain a no-frills functionality. But the beauty of the place comes on the top floor, where a circular lounge/dining room looks out directly into the treetops and, best of all, a ceiling hatch opens on to an outdoor observation deck, commanding a 360-degree vista of rainforest canopy. It’s a roof garden to beat all roof gardens.
With so much of their wildlife hidden in the treetops, rainforests can be frustrating places at ground level. That’s why this toucan’s-eye view of the action is so special. And our viewing doesn’t stop at dawn: lunch yesterday brought a 6ft-long iguana clambering up to dining-room window level as we munched on our avocado salad. And after dinner, as we settled in sofas to tot up the day’s sightings, Alex’s torch revealed first a kinkajou – a lithe, fruit-eating carnivore – slinking along a branch, then a black-and-white owl perched lower down, its two-tone plumage etched with a calligraphist’s delicacy.
These treetop vigils are addictive: both the checking-in daily with characters whom we have come to know as individuals, and the constant possibility of spotting something new, such as the punk-coiffured Geoffroy’s tamarins that yesterday came scampering around the deck. It would be easy to spend the whole week up top, moving no further than a sloth, but Alex had other treats in store.
Day one had seen us tramping down Semaphore Hill, where we found that exploring the forest on foot was very different from peering into it from above. At first it was maddening: a lot of awkward neck-craning producing little more than glimpses. But slowly, under the patient direction of Alex and his eagle-eyed assistant Domi, we adjusted our perspective, crouching to inspect an industrious stream of leafcutter ants ferrying their jigsaw-piece trophies, or admiring the electric-blue pulse of a morpho butterfly flitting through the gloom. With practice, we became more alive to movement: an agouti pattering over the leaf litter; an anolis lizard scampering up a trunk. Our guides, of course, kept some aces up their sleeves: two night monkeys peering wide-eyed from their tree hole earned a chorus of gasps.
The truck allowed us to explore further afield. On day two we drove north to the Pipeline Road, named after never-completed Second World War plans for an alternative oil supply in the event of an attack on the canal. Today this forest track is famed for its bird life. Our tally included soft-hooting trogons and motmots, which hid their finery among the shadows, and a pageant of hummingbirds – such gems as blue-throated goldentail and violet-crowned woodnymph – that zipped around the nectar feeders at the information centre with high-octane urgency.
On day three we ventured further still – to San Lorenzo National Park, on the Caribbean coast. There was no sign of the jaguars that reputedly haunt its forests, but we spied a tamandua – a tree-climbing anteater – that had descended to cross the road. Further along the trail, rubbery-nosed coatis snuffled through the leaf litter and a troop of white-faced capuchin monkeys crashed through the branches overhead, venting their outrage in a hail of sticks.
The humidity at the coast was stifling. Cameras fogged as we munched sandwiches among the ruins of 16th-century San Lorenzo Fort, built by the conquistadors to protect the gold route from Peru. But our return to the capital by air-conditioned tourist train, downing cold beers from the buffet car as swamp and forest rattled past the window, was a delight. The track wound alongside the Panama Canal, a miracle of engineering that claimed nearly 30,000 lives in its brutal construction and now ferries some 333?million tonnes of shipping between the Atlantic and Pacific every year. At Miraflores lock, the following day, we joined a gallery of spectators to watch one behemoth of a freighter inch through this narrowest of apertures. A soundtrack of relentless blasting from the museum downstairs conveyed some idea of what it had once taken to smash a 48-mile-long trench through the middle of a continent.
For Panama, the canal has brought untold economic riches. For us, it offered another convenient means of exploring the country’s natural treasures. Next day we boarded a small motor launch and, dodging the freighters, slipped off the main channel and into the less-trafficked backwaters of Gatun Lake. Here we found purple swamphens picking through flowering mats of water hyacinth, spotted the goggle eyes of an otherwise submerged cayman and watched a boa constrictor uncoil its gleaming length along the muscular limbs of an overhanging fig tree.
America’s military are long gone but the US influence in Panama lingers: not least at Isla Barro Colorado, an island in the canal that has hosted a Smithsonian research project since 1923 and today lays a claim to being the most intensively studied tract of rainforest in the world. Delivered by speedboat into the hands of the reserve’s guides, we spent a morning wandering the trails, finding everything from red-eyed tree frogs to a long-limbed family of spider monkeys. We learnt that the island’s 5,400 hectares protected some 1,369 species of flowering plant, 110 mammals and 335 birds.
“But did you see as much there as you saw with me here?” quizzed Alex, as we regaled him with tales of our day on the island. After dinner, determined not to be outdone, he bundled us into the vehicle for a night drive. With the forest gently steaming after a downpour, our spotlight picked out the glowing eyes of woolly opossums in the canopy and a nine-banded armadillo on the verge. Meanwhile, bats strafed our headlight beam for moths while frogs and insects thrummed in chorus from the darkness. “There’s Scorpio,” explained Alex, pointing out a constellation that twinkled like fairy lights through the canopy.
On our ninth morning we had our final breakfast at the Canopy Tower before packing up for our transfer to El Valle de Anton. Here, a morning’s drive to the west, our tour would end with two nights in a very different Panama: one of misty plateaus, tumbling streams and the Canopy Lodge, where life resumed at ground level. The cooler highlands climate offered a refreshing foil to steamy Soberanía.
As Alex loaded the minibus for departure, I couldn’t resist sneaking back up for one last scan from the deck. The woodpecker was back – as were the aracaris. Most important, the sloth was still there. He’d moved to another tree, but I’d recognise those moves anywhere. “Easy does it,” I urged, before climbing downstairs and closing the hatch behind me.