Curiouser and curiouser: Into the Canopy!

Today was the first day of field work at our dry forest site. The park, "Parque Natural Metropolitano" (8º59’N, 79º33’W), is on the outskirts of Panama City, about 40 minutes from the schoolhouse. It is relatively small, only 232 hectares, but very important given that little tropical dry forest has been preserved.

As we walked into the park we saw a Blue-crowned Motmot. The interesting thing about Motmots is their tail feathers. Most Motmots have a very distinctive tail shape and they wave their tails back and forth like a pendulum when they see a predator so as to deter pursuit. There is a popular myth that Motmots pluck their tail feathers to form the distinctive shape. Though the feathers do grow in as normally shaped, intact feathers, the shape is simply formed by certain barbs being weaker and therefore falling off due to slight abrasion.

Blue-crowned Motmot (Momotus momota), note the tail feathers.

The really exciting part about PNM is that it has a canopy crane. The crane is about 40 meters tall and has an arm of length of 50 meters, so it covers quite a considerable area. The most immediately striking thing was the skyline of Panama city. You can also just make out ships out in the harbor waiting to go through the canal.

The view of Panama City and the Pacific from the canopy crane.

The view of the forest from above is much different than the view from beneath. For example, many species have flowers only up at the top of the canopy which is out of sight from the forest floor. One type of tree, the Wild Cashew (Anacardium excelsum) had particularly interesting inflorescences (branching flower clusters).

Cashew flowers. The flowers are actually very small on these branching inflorescences, the ones here are past their peak. On the left you can get a sense for the effect of so many large inflorescences and on the right you can see the intricacy of each one.

A sloth was hanging out (haha) in one of the cashew trees. At first it was scratching itself, but it soon went to sleep. Apparently sloths don't actually sleep as much as we used to think. Although in captivity they will sleep for about 16 hours a day, field studies have shown them to sleep for only 9.6 hours a day on average.

Sleeping sloth.

As we moved over to look at the sloth, movement from another tree caught our attention. They were, my professor said "Mono titi," or tamarin monkeys (Sanguinus geoffroyi). There were two of them, but one of them was camera shy--or perhaps just predator shy.