Day Two - Parque Metropolitano

I never imagined how miserable life could be without a camera battery.

You see, I left mine at home.

Knucklehead!

Dope!

Dimwit!

IDIOTA!!

Believe me, I've called myself every one of those names and way more since discovering early that second day that I had indeed left the battery at home. In fact, the Geoffrey's Tamarin (which species we saw) above has the look on his face that Kelly had when I told her. "You did what?"

I just left the battery, though, not the camera nor the lenses. Nothing like carrying around a useless paperweight while on vacation.

Oh, well. Pucker up and kiss the ugly fat girl on the jaw (sorry). There's nothing else you can do, because evidently Nikon does not supply Panama with any of their fine products. I tried.

So, every picture you see here was either taken with my Ipad, my little point and shoot Kodak, or is borrowed from some anonymous user on my Google machine. Talk about disappointing.

To finally get down to it, day two was dedicated to birding. We hired a dude named Gonzalo to show us around, and show us around he did. I think we got a good 30 different species of birds at the Parque Metropolitano, a large natural park in the middle of Panama City. To give you a little better understand of where it is and how big it is, there's a map here.

Just a few of the birds we saw on this day (not my pictures) were:

Blue Dacnis Dusky Antbird Common Potoo White-Necked Puffbird Red-Crowned Woodpecker Squirrel Cuckoo

It was a long walk around the park, most of the morning. We also saw Howlers (my favorites), a Coatimondi (look it up here, some Tamarins, and a Two-Toed Sloth. All in all, a great first day in the country, except for the fact that I was almost mauled by the Coatimundi. Thank goodness there were no Coatimundi ankle-biters with dear 'ole dad. He would have been on me like stink on a skunk.

Then Gonzalo would have really earned his money.

Coming soon - Day Three - The Panama Canal

------------