Panamanian Night Monkeys

“Let me see if my little friends are home,” said Jorge, our guide, as he stepped off the trail into a hidden clearing, dark and still, like a miniature temple in the forest. His “friends,” a trio of Panamanian night monkeys, were indeed home, and when my eyes adjusted to the dimness and found theirs, the rest of the world fell away. It was a rare gift, something even most Panamanians never experience. Tiny—only a foot long and under two pounds—they peered out at me from their tree cavity with the large eyes of night creatures, gently pushing past each other to get a look at the much larger primate looking back at them. Of all the species I have observed in the wild, encounters with other primates are somehow different. There is an ineffable current of recognition that connects us, a mutually felt sense of “this one is like me,” a whispered reminder that we are not something separate from nature, but just as much a part of this endless river of life as the rainforest, the birds, and my new little friends.

White-whiskered Puffbird

Feathers do not hang statically on birds like clothing. Birds have remarkable muscular control of them, and the basic design of their wing bones mirrors our own arms. Their primary flight feathers are attached to their fingers and can be manipulated with great precision, just as we have fine motor control in our hands. Body feathers move in groups, and can be held tight to the body, “sleeked,” or fluffed up. Puffbirds tend to hold their body feathers loosely at rest, giving them a puffy appearance, thus the very literal name. It’s the same mechanism by which a dog raises its “hackles” or a porcupine stiffens its quills—tiny muscles called piloerectors that work equally well with feathers or fur. You have them too, but we humans have lost voluntary control of them, along with most of our hair. So, instead of fluffing our feathers or raising our hackles, we get goosebumps. When nature finds a design that works, she repurposes it across seemingly unbridgeable divides, connecting all living things through shared patterns of form and function.

Ocellated Antbird

When we are able to sufficiently detach from our busy, modern lives, it is possible to tune back into a flow of perception that either lies dormant and unused, or is drowned out by technological noise. As I descended a gentle slope toward a small creek burbling in the humid rainforest darkness, subconscious cues whispered “something is about to happen.” My intuition was confirmed a second later by the excited tone of our guide’s hushed exclamation: “ocellated antbird!” There is really only one way to see this elusive species. You must cross paths with an army ant swarm, and we had. Suddenly there were five species of antbird, including this one—named for the dark eye-like spots, called ocelli, on its back. The ocellated antbird does not eat the army ants; it lives symbiotically with them, following them everywhere, eating insects and other prey that they flush from their hiding spots as the arthropod army marches through the forest. The birds moved in lock-step with the ants, oblivious to our clicking shutters, flitting to perches close enough to touch. After a few minutes of intense action, the ant swarm disappeared, and the birds vanished with them.

Rusty-margined Flycatcher

Flycatchers, the family Tyrannidae, eat most anything resembling an insect, not just flies. It is apparently a good way for a bird to make a living, because with well over four hundred species, Tyrannidae is a long limb on the avian branch of the tree of life. The trunk, the kingdom Animalia, includes flycatchers, insects, and calendar readers alike. From that trunk, birds and photographers thereof share the phylum Chordata (“with spinal cords”), while insects diverge into the phylum Arthropoda. People and birds part ways at the next fork, into the classes Mammalia and Aves. Within Aves, flycatchers belong to the order Passeriformes, “perching birds,” comprising 142 families, including Tyrannidae, then genus Myiozetetes, and finally the species M. cayanensis, the rusty-margined flycatcher. When Linnaeus created his system of taxonomy in the 1700s, species were classified mostly according to how they looked and behaved. Today, we can see the deeper genetic relationships, and thus taxonomy is more than a category. It is a map illuminating the flow of DNA trickling through eons to form every living thing, including us.

Snail Kite

A generalist can remain somewhat detached from their environment, but can never fully exploit a specific opportunity. The specialist, on the other hand, can dominate their niche, but in doing so they become inextricably connected to it. The snail kite is an extreme avian specialist. They feed almost exclusively on apple snails, their sharp bills curved perfectly to extract the mollusks from their shells. This adult male, perched stoically in the afternoon downpour, depends on the tropical rain soaking his head feathers to fill the marsh beneath him. It is the shallow marsh that creates an ideal habitat for the baseball-sized snails that are his primary food source, while also sustaining the rainforest. It is the forest that returns the rain to the sky through the respiration of the trees, enables the water cycle, and stops the Panama Canal’s water source, Gatun Lake, from filling with run-off. The rain sustains the rainforest, and the rainforest sustains the rain, which sustains the marsh, snails, lake, canal, snail kites, and people—intricate, connected, interdependent, and beautiful.

Smooth-billed Anis

These prehistoric-looking smooth-billed anis are members of the cuckoo family, a diverse group that also includes roadrunners. This pair, having found an elevated perch from which they can survey the grassy areas where they forage, is engaged in “sentinel” behavior. The rest of their small group is busy plucking insects from the foliage below, while these two keep a look-out for predators, just one example of how these birds connect and cooperate. Anis are communal nesters, an unusual arrangement for birds where all members of the group help build a single nest that is then used by several females. All the parents take turns incubating the eggs, but the dominant male always takes the night shift. He sits in the nest from dusk until dawn while the others sleep nearby. When the eggs hatch, everyone helps feed and incubate the young, even group members who are unrelated to the nestlings. These odd-looking glossy black birds are not merely individuals looking out for themselves. Each ani is a link in an unbroken chain of cooperative spirit flowing from one generation to the next, sharing roles and resources, thriving through connection.

Blue-chested Hummingbird

Fast-motion aerial combat ebbed and flowed around the feeders as dozens of hummingbirds advanced and retreated in tight circles and high-G elliptical maneuvers. I made a much lower-speed circle just in time to capture a few frames of this lone blue-chested hummingbird feeding on porterweed flowers before it disappeared in a blur. Given only this one short observation from my stationary perspective, it would be almost impossible to understand what this bird was actually doing. But if I could zoom out and manage to trace its blinding movements, I would see a perfectly optimized circuit that would return it to this same plant thirty or forty minutes hence, because blue-chested hummingbirds are “trapliners” (as is the tamarin on the cover). They visit the same plants, in the same order, every day, like a trapper checking his snares. The flowers know this, having co-evolved with these emerald and blue pollinators. The porterweed refills its flowers with nectar on the same schedule, a botanical circle in time synchronized with an avian circle in space, all part of the interlocking and invisible rhythms of nature.

Brown-throated Sloth

A river flows at exactly the pace dictated by gravity. From plunging mountain cascades to the languid, almost imperceptible current of the Everglades, water moves downhill no slower—but no faster—than it must. Likewise, living organisms move precisely at the pace of metabolism. The hummingbird races about at whitewater tempo, while the sloth moves more like Florida’s river of grass, just as their respective metabolisms require. Like the Everglades, sloths are as much an ecosystem as an organism. The gray and brown color of the three-toed sloth is tinged green with a unique algae that thrives only in the unusual grooves and ridges of their coarse fur. That algae, in turn, feeds a species of moth that also exists only in the sloth’s fur. The sloth becomes a nexus, slowly taking in nutrients from the leaves of the cecropia and other preferred trees, passing them through its body, sustaining itself while also casting new and different life back into the world, a living channel of transformation inhabiting Panama’s rainforest, alongside the man-made one passing through it.

Fulvous-vented Euphonia

When we explore language, we can trace our shared human experience like invisible currents flowing through time. One of twenty-five species of euphonia, this female fulvous-vented euphonia, posing patiently for me in the soft afternoon rain, is named for her sweet voice. Her name comes from the Greek eu, for “well” or “good,” and phone for “voice” or “sound,” and by understanding it, we get a sense of not only what early naturalists saw, but how they felt. They found her voice beautiful, and thus by starting with the name we give to this tiny member of the finch family, we can link the human experience of beauty and goodness across domains and history. Euthymia, “well spirit,” is the healthy balance between depression and mania. A euphemism is a pleasing name we give to something that otherwise isn’t. When we offer a eulogy, we speak well of someone we have lost. Much about life changes, but humanity has always been moved by beauty and inspired to create it, and sharing a quiet moment immersed in nature, connected to this tiny bird, I suppose I experienced something close to euphoria.

Ringed Kingfisher

The powers of concentration of the ringed kingfisher, the largest in the Americas, would make the most accomplished meditator feel like a caffeinated kindergartner in a toy store full of puppies. When hunting, she can hold her intense focus on the water below for up to two hours at a time, her attention unwavering, undivided, and unbroken. We humans are lucky to manage a few seconds, deluged and distracted as we are by ceaseless and disparate stimuli, much of which originates between our own ears. Her physical stillness belies the torrent of data coursing through her from her surroundings, a continuous flow of invisible energy from prey to predator. Her keen eyes catch the slightest ripple, the subtlest shadow, the briefest flash of silvery scales, ensuring that she will not miss her moment. She is not always successful, of course. Her potential meal is just as adapted to avoiding her powerful bill as she is at wielding it, but even a miss will not disrupt her flow state. She will simply return to her perch, shake the beads of water from her glossy blue-green and orange feathers, and begin again.

Northern Black-throated Trogon

Trogons are part of a “basal radiation” of bird species, which is a fancy way of saying they are ancient, the trunk from which other evolutionary branches reach forward. Current research hints at the shape and essence of this lineage, though the exact connections remain murky. Even the clearest water obscures our vision when it is fifty million years deep, where the earliest trogon fossils are found. Still, something about these birds, beyond just their stunning iridescent plumage, sets them apart; some important signal penetrates those depths. Though they tend to sit motionless, they command one’s attention, as if their separation from other birds in time somehow draws them into sharper relief. As they slowly roll their heads to gaze at you through eyes fixed in their sockets, they silently convey a sense of that unbroken stream that connects now with antiquity, all manifested in a thing of tropical beauty.

Central American Agouti

Tropical forests conjure fears of venomous snakes, stinging insects, and deadly poison dart frogs, but those are just the obvious risks. Imagine finding yourself suddenly bombarded with six-inch, four-pound projectiles falling at fifty miles per hour. These mystery missiles are the fruit of the Brazil nut tree, and hanging out under one at the wrong time poses real danger. The intact fruits are huge, heavy, and tough, and only the agouti, with its sharp rodent teeth, can open them. The dozen-plus nuts inside (technically seeds) are more than one meal, so they bury the leftovers, sewing a new crop of Brazil nut trees that will rise back to the rainforest canopy in another hundred years. The husks the agouti leaves behind fill with water, becoming homes for other species, including the poison dart frog’s tadpoles.

Geoffroy's Tamarin

I featured this little monkey on the cover of my 2025 calendar. It is twelve inches square, making the Geoffroy’s tamarin on the cover about 70% actual size. No bigger than a gray squirrel, it is the smallest of the Central American monkeys. This one and its family played it cool until we finished our lunch, then snuck into the dining room at Canopy Tower to steal a snack when the big primates weren’t looking.

Black-bellied Whistling Ducks

I am the father of a teenage daughter, so for me, the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” is now permanently associated with Taylor Swift, who includes the line in the lyrics to her song, Bejeweled. The adage is usually attributed to Aesop, which means it predates Miss Swift by over 2,500 years. Timeless wisdom indeed! With some birds, like these black-bellied whistling ducks, I can see the point. While I am always thrilled to see them, attractive and interesting ducks that they are, I can imagine that one might grow tired of their presence. As the name suggests, they do, in fact, whistle—quite a lot, actually. As nocturnal feeders, they do much of their whistling at night, and in areas where they are abundant (much of the southern U.S.), they do it in large numbers. I’m sure a huge flock of noisy whistling ducks bustling around the neighborhood pond in the middle of the night can get old. I am also sure that, like so many things that grow familiar over time, we would miss them terribly if they were gone.

Reddish Egret

This reddish egret is obviously not reddish in color. Egretta rufescens comes in two morphs (“forms”): its eponymous reddish color, and white. The white morph is far less common, but otherwise identical. The reddish egret is our rarest and least studied member of the heron family. It, and all egrets, were hunted for their plumes nearly to the point of extirpation (local extinction) in the United States. In the late 1800s, millions of egrets were killed each year simply to decorate hats. Their feathers once sold for $32 per ounce, more than the price of gold at the time. Imagining the heartless killing of these beautiful creatures in the name of vanity, it is tempting to judge our ancestors as monsters, yet this was almost certainly not the case. Their monstrous acts, like so many others, were born of ignorance, a lack of knowledge. Thankfully, we saw the error of our ways and changed course in time, but just barely. Today, there are still only 1,500–2,000 mating pairs of reddish egrets in the United States, with most, including this individual, in Texas. For me, knowing that I was almost denied the privilege of witnessing this fragile, yet fierce bird dancing in the shallows is clear evidence that we must never stop learning.

Red-winged Blackbird

Can you see this species close to home? If you live anywhere in the United States, the answer is yes. The same applies to most of Mexico, and all but the most northern parts of Canada. The red-winged blackbird is one of the most abundant species in North America. With an estimated 250 million breeding pairs, their numbers are comparable to another abundant species on this continent: Homo sapiens! They occasionally form flocks in the millions. Males, with their shiny black plumage and namesake scarlet-red wing bars, go out of their way to make themselves visible, calling and displaying constantly from cattails, power lines, and high perches everywhere. Females, like this one, are much more discreet, staying closer to the ground where they nest. Their abundance is largely a result of their adaptability. While they prefer wetlands, they can manage perfectly well in agricultural and suburban environments, too. We have more in common with these birds than just our numbers.