Mount Totumas Cloud Forest

Here is a Link to an updated list of Birds seen at Mount Totumas Cloud Forest and adjacent La Amistad National Park. All the birds noted on this list were seen within a two hour walk of the home.  I anticipate there will be many additions to this list in the months and years ahead as there still hasn’t been extensive field observations  during all seasons of the year. In addition the higher elevations of La Amistad NP near the home have received very few hours of field observation.  Elevation range of the birds listed here is from 1650m to 2600m.  Birds observed on the 4WD road from the main road up to the property boundary are not included.

A pair of Golden-Browed Chlorophonias were feeding this morning on the fruit of a shrub that is quite common here along forest edges and on pastures that we have allowed nature to reclaim. I collected the fruit to plant these shrubs as part of native landscaping we plan to do around the house.

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Maybe one day on some future deck we will build on some early sunny morning with a cup of fresh roasted coffee we can watch these birds close up! These shots were taken from about 30 feet away with a 100m lens and are cropped and greatly enlarged.  The shrubs were growing under a grove of Inga sp. trees. The parallel veins on the leaf of the shrub suggest Melastomataceae?

It would be nice to get a botanist specialized in montane habitats up here at Mount Totumas Cloud Forest for a couple of days.  Free lodging in return for sharing your knowledge.

This Mexican Hairy Porcupine Coendou mexicanus was about 35 feet up a small tree snoozing along the Rio Colorado at about 1900m. They are nocturnal and when you spot one during the day they don’t do much but look down on you with sleepy eyes as this one did.

A slight rain falling while sitting silently in the shadows. A Green Violet Ear hummingbird feeds on the white tipped red tubular flowers on this extensive vine that was just inside the forest at about 1940m.  No pics of the hummingbird, just this riot of blossoms many of them just a few feet off the ground.

Scintillant Hummingbirds are nesting. They seem to like the road cuts where erosion has created an overhang  at the base of roots and soil and here they build their tiny nests.  Together with Green Violet Ear they are the commonest Hummingbirds in the area.

At the feeders at our home at this time of year we have three species of Hummingbirds;  Stripe-tailed Hummingbird, Scintillant Hummingbird and White Throated Mountain Gem.

Band-tailed Pigeons have returned in force the last half of the month.  Buff-fronted Quail Doves are seen singly on most days in forests patches when walking the road near the home. The Field Guide indicates that the Chiriqui Quail Dove is more common in this area but we have only spotted one individual during the past year. The Buff-fronted are far more common here.

Three Wattled Bellbirds still remain silent as of March 1^st.  Only two sightings were recorded in February. Resplendent Quetzals however are back in force and the very last couple of days of February we are seeing and hearing them in the forest behind the house. Males with their long streaming tails are displaying their courtship flight with squawking calls.  For visitors intent on seeing Resplendent Quetzals and wanting to visit us in the dry season it seems that waiting until the beginning of March would be advised.  There is a wild Avocado tree Persia sp. that is fruiting on our neighbor Mr Vega’s property. I was told that there have been a group or Quetzals there since around 2 weeks so I headed over there with the hopes of getting some photos.  I was well rewarded with very cooperative birds but the weather was windy and rainy.  The wind was curling the long streaming tails of the male Quetzals captured on a few of the photos. It seems the lens on the spotting scope was just foggy enough to capture the rainy ambience of the day. On the same tree during the two hours I hung around I saw Emerald Toucanets and Black Guan.  When a pair of Black Guans arrived they chased the Quetzals away. All three of these species are frugivores.

I met with Mr. Vega our neighbor who has lived on his homesteading site since 1962 and is a wealth of information on the local area.

I sat with him at his simple home and he told me every year at the end of February he sees dozens of Quetzals stream by his property and one evening last year he had 22 individuals roosting in the forest next to his house.  Once the breeding season settles in he only sees about 6-8 individuals on his property.

Mr. Vega said the birds migrate from Cotito at this time of year. That happens to be where the lowest pass on the continental divide is located here in far western Chiriqui and where the main footpaths are located that link Chiriqui with Boca de Torro provinces.  The Monteverde Ecology and Conservation Book I have here at Mount Totumas states that the Resplendent Quetzal in Costa Rica spends November through January  on the Atlantic Forests and comes back over to Monteverde on the pacific cloud forests to breed by the end of January.  From Mr. Vega’s comments it would seem to indicate similar movements here in Western Panama but with the migration from the Atlantic forests happening a bit later.  The higher elevations of the Talamanca mountain range are over 2500m and dominated by oak/bamboo forests. I haven’t ever spotted Quetzals in these habitats  the few times I ventured into these areas.  I’m wondering if the Quetzals follow  lower elevation habitats where their food sources are during their altitudinal migrations between the Pacific and Atlantic forests they inhabit and avoid  the higher elevations on the continental divide dominated by Oak bamboo forests. This might explain why Mr. Vega had 22 individuals  roosting by his home if the birds are funneling through the lower passes.  Taking a census annually at the end of February on the lower passes of Western Chiriqui may very well provide useful data on the population fluctuations of these birds if this is true.  In any case it has been inspiring the past days seeing the movements of these birds through Mount Totumas Cloud Forest as they are returning in ever greater numbers. I hope to find a few nesting sites in the weeks ahead to add some photos here.

We just completed the renovation of the kitchen and dining room. Pictures are worth a thousand words so let’s look first at the kitchen before the renovation……………..

And now AFTER

The new dining room table and kitchen cabinets were made in Volcan by Gabriel Rodriguez  who has a local wood shop. We support local businesses in Volcan instead of going to David to the big box stores where the furniture is all particle board and made somewhere far away.  Getting the cabinets to fit in the uneven dimensions of the kitchen was a challenge and we needed to also reinforce the cabinets to support the artisan Mexican tiles that we used for the counter tops.  The artisan tile work was Michael’s work of art and he extended his visit for 5 days to finish the job.

At the entrance of Mount Totumas Cloud Forest at around 1600m we have a small grove of shade grown coffee that was planted some 20 years ago. The dozen  trees are all well established and the only care they receive is the clearing away of underbrush by machete once a year in January when the fruit are ripe.  Roberto and his family have been harvesting this grove for their own consumption and roasting the coffee in the traditional way so today we’ll take you through the steps from harvest to a fresh roasted brewed cup of high elevation Panamanian coffee as enjoyed by the Rodriquez Montezuma family.  See the slide show at the bottom of this post which is arranged following the process from harvest to cup!

Harvesting is by hand.  Only the deep red fruit are picked as these have fully ripened beans.  The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee fruit.  The fruit has to be removed around the bean so that the bean can then be dried. Fresh harvested fruit are placed in a sack and submerged in water for several days to soften so that the coffee bean can easily be separated from the fruit mashing  by hand in a bucket.

Once the fruit flesh is removed the beans are laid out in the sun for up to 10 days to dry. We placed the beans every morning on a piece of corrugated galvanized aluminum zinc to dry out in the sun. Every evening the beans were returned to a bucket and the following morning once again spread out to dry. After a week the outer shell coating of the beans begin to crack and the beans are then placed in a sack and pounded with a stout branch or pole to remove completely the outer shell.  With the outer shell of the bean removed we now have a recognizable raw green coffee bean.

Next step is roasting. The beans are placed in a heavy metal pot over hot coals and are stirred constantly to insure an even roast. The beans go from raw green to a light brown and once a dark rich brown color is reached the aroma of the bean roasting starts to drift in the breeze.  Like all harvests, even the humble  small quantity we roasted,  there is a communal sense of joy we all shared.

With the roasting done we let the beans cool just enough to put them through the hand grinder producing fresh ground Mount Totumas Cloud Forest Coffee .  High elevation air, fresh coffee and surrounded by virgin cloud forest sets the spirits free.  There isn’t a café in Seattle or Zürich that can compete with this!

Additional posts will follow on our plans to expand our small grove by adding an additional grove at a higher elevation already identified as an ideal location by a coffee consultant we had visit our site a few months ago.

We had internet installed at Mount Totumas Cloud Forest today. This is certainly important for logistics and communication especially for coordinating the arrival and departure of guests and contacting suppliers etc.  So this is a good thing.  To photograph a Resplendent Quetzal in the morning and share these images the same day with friends of Mount Totumas all around the world is also something to marvel out. At the same time however we have to acknowledge that something has been compromised with the arrival of the internet. A digital tentacle from the world has penetrated the isolated unplugged wilderness here and this tether feels invasive.

From MT – Cattle

Well, yesterday at the cow auction in Bugaba we purchased 7 young calves. William Yanguez delivered them to entrance of the Los Pozos road where we corralled them for the night. Early the next morning Roberto and Carlos left on horse-back at sunrise to round them up and bring them the 9km up the road to Mount Totumas.   They arrived late morning and we immediately held them in our corral to give them some of the initial vaccines and vitamins.  Vampire bats are a nuisance and transmit diseases and most of our cattle suffer from vampire bat bites on their necks. We treat them with a salve repellent that the bats don’t like.  Anyway this post is about the drama that unfolded late in the afternoon after we had released the new calves from the corral. Roberto came up and reported one of them was missing. They had wandered down to the entrance gate and we were afraid the one missing had crossed the river and was heading back down to the main road. We took the truck and the horses and the three of us searched in vain. None of the locals we came across on the road had seen the calf and there were no tracks by the river indicating a single calf print heading back down. So we assumed he was back up somewhere near the house. We searched again and eventually Carlos spotted him on a pasture at the edge of the forest. This calf was a mix between Simental (Swiss Brown) and Brahma,  its gangly ears gave away its Brahma blood. Roberto mentioned to me that these Brahma mixes can be uncooperative and this calf was dead set against cooperating with us when we tried to get him moving through a gate to join the rest of the herd. He just took off across the pasture and entered the forest looking more like a white-tailed deer than a cow! He entered a heavily forested area that has cliffs and waterfalls and is the steepest drop on the land.  We didn’t want to scare the calf so we quietly followed his tracks in the forest and eventually found him quite a ways in.  Failing to coax him back up to the pastures he once again went on a rampage and took off deeper in the forest until we saw the poor little guy drop over the edge of a steep drop off and Roberto looked over at me gravely and said, “Se mato” (he just killed himself). We expected the worst as we peered over the edge into the jungle below. We spotted the 400 lb calf lying still 40 feet below at the bottom of a canyon by the stream in deep tangled vegetation looking very much dead. He still had his tag number 393 from the auction which was visible on his back. We had to work our way around the cliff and eventually scrambled to the bottom and came up to the calf that was surprisingly still alive. We were even more surprised to find that the calf stood up and seemed ok, at least no bones broken. The place he dropped was all soft soils and looking up at the steep embankment it looks like he just rolled down and was somewhat cushioned by the thick underbrush. It was getting on toward nightfall and we were at the base of these cliffs in the middle of a jungle with deadfall and big rocks and in solid undergrowth steep on all sides except the stream cut that continued steeply down. There was no way this calf was moving far tonight. Carlos, Gabriel and I stayed put while Roberto went back for an Axe, flashlight, machetes and rope. Once he returned we were chopping dead fall tree logs and clearing with machetes a path to get the calf out of the predicament he was in. Once we got a path cleared down to the small quebrada we roped the calf and literally had to drag and pull that exhausted animal down to the stream and get it across and to a clearing in the forest we made where we roped him to a tree for the night. It was a moonless night and getting pitch dark at this time and the plan was to get back down here first thing in the morning and clear a trail with machetes down to a pasture where the stream meets the Rio Colorado. We headed back out of the forest with hundreds of fireflies as company. The next morning a path was cleared and the calf was rejoined with his six companions by midday. This was one lucky calf and we all had a good laugh over the whole ordeal and I heartedly thanked both Roberto and Carlos for their fine work in saving this calf.

During the time in 2010 that I will be on site I will post images that seem to me to capture something of the essence of Mount Totumas Cloud Forest. Here are two photographs taken during the past week that capture the awe inspiring beauty of these cloud forest mountains. The first is a Rothschildia Silk Moth that appeared at the UV bug light I set up on a cloudy still night. It was a pristine specimen and the following morning I set it on an old oak post and marveled at the velvety texture of its coloration, imaging this insect deep in the cloud forest were I later released it hidden amongst the deep colored textures of the epiphytic laden branches of the forest trees.

The second photo is of an orchid species Oncidium carinifera commonly found at Mount Totumas at all elevation levels and well into La Amistad NP as well.  This specimen was on the trunk of a tree only about 6 feet above the ground at eye level at around 2000m inside La Amistad NP. It had at least 75 blooms and was only one of several large old specimens in the area. To walk in a forest and see such an abundance of flowering orchid specimens each several decades old is truly remarkable. There are few forests left on the planet so untouched that you can find specimens like this so accessible in full splendor that remain uncollected.  Your eye can wander from the micro scene of taking in the full beauty of this orchid and then pan back to the macro scene of the forest with ancient oaks and laurels all covered with epiphytes. One is left grateful and humbled by such scenes.

From MT – Photos of the Week

This morning I found an IO moth Automeris sp. I didn’t turn on the UV light last night to attract insects but this moth was attracted to the inside lighting anyway and I discovered it outside on the windowsill of the living room.  Here is a photo.

It l looks a lot like a dead leaf.  This family of moths along with several other families of Lepidoptera have eye spots that are a defense against predators. When attacked by a flycatcher for example this moth will expose its underwings and two big eye spots will temporarily create a flight response in the bird as these eyespots resemble the forward facing eyes of a predator. That moment of panic often gives the moth just enough time to escape. This is a classic text book story in entomology. So here is a photo with this same moth with its underwings exposed.

I just had to slightly agitate the moth for him to fan open his underwings to expose these predatory eyes. It’s a beautiful insect and the eyespots surely look affective in temporarily scaring a potential avian predator. But what about that large black round spot above its thorax. Is this part of its display?  Let’s look at a photo of this moth turned around 180 degrees.

Damn if that black spot doesn’t look like a nose to me.   Together with the eyespots a face appears that looks like a fanciful member of the weasel or raccoon family.  Kind of foxy even, wouldn’t you say? So consulting the field guide of Neotropical Rainforest Mammals here at Mount Totumas we can look for a Central American arboreal predator. For example in the raccoon family found here in these cloud forests is the Cacomistle.  Now let’s give the Cacomistle a fanciful new face using the pattern of the Automeris moth.  Here is the result in a photo of a drawing I made with my limited artistic ability.

I wonder if that black patch on the thorax of that moth does complete a terrifying face for the Tropical Kingbird who is intent on making a meal of this insect? Or if this is just my own projection on the pattern of this beautiful insect? What do you think?