A foray north: into a new rainforest.

I have returned to the land (house) of internet, lukewarm (as opposed to cold) showers, and air conditioning.  The first is perhaps the most exciting. While I'm generally perfectly happy to be away from internet, it's rather difficult to identify my butterflies (there are no printed guides of Panamanian butterflies, only a website of North American butterflies which includes Panama) and write my final paper (due at noon on Friday) without it.

The lack of internet has also kept me from the blog. Since the next few days will be spent working on data analysis and report writing, there won't be anything much of interest happening, so we'll just pretend that today is Monday...

We woke up for a 7 AM departure for San Lorenzo Protected Area. We drove north to the Caribbean coast and then turned west. This required crossing the canal. Although elsewhere there are large bridges which cross the canal, here we drove right over the lock, which meant first waiting for a ship to go through. Then, as we crossed, we could see water spewing from the canal through the lock.

San Lorenzo Protected Area, like Parque Natural Metropolitano, has a canopy crane (this one 50 meters tall):

The crane. Maintenance of some sort was being done, hence the man with the hard hat.

You could see Colón:

Colon is on the right.

And the Chagres River:

The Chagres River. On the far point to the right are ruins of Fort San Lorenzo,
 a Spanish fort built in the 16th century.

While we were up in the crane Yves, our professor (an entomologist), caught a horsefly that was trying to bite him, giving us a nice close-up:

Yves holding a horsefly.

Back down in the understory, there were some pretty cool spiders:

I loved the cross in the middle of this one.  It was shiny--more silvery than white.

Golden silk orb-weaver (genus Nephila).
"Golden" because of the color of the web.

And howlers!