500 Adrenaline Adventures (Frommer's) - Lois Friedland [147]
While you’re still in the city limits, you’ll also want to spend some time in the protected rainforest at the Metropolitan National Park, where you could see a mixed flock of nearly 25 birds at once. There are more than 260 bird species in this park, including lance-tailed manakins, rosy-thrush tanagers, orange-billed sparrows, rufous, green honeycreepers, and white wrens. But to spot a famed resplendent quetzal, you’ll need to travel a bit farther into western Panama.
The Aztecs and the Mayans revered the resplendent quetzal; Panama’s royalty and priests even wore its feathers during special ceremonies. Today, many birders consider it be the most beautiful bird in the Americas. The iridescent male quetzal boasts dense plumage and a long, green tail that can reach almost a meter (3 ft.) during mating season. Although the females don’t have such long tails and tend to be somewhat less vibrant than males, they share the brilliant blue, green, and red coloring of their mates.
Most of these birds live in the mountainous, tropical forest regions of Central America. The best place to see a vibrant quetzal in Panama is in the cloud forests of the Chiriqui highlands, particularly by hiking the Sendero Los Quetzales (the Quetzales Trail) on the north side of the Volcan Baru National Park and at Finca Lerida above Boquete. For an overview of Panama’s amazing bird wonderland, check out Ancon Expedition’s Highlights of Avian Panama tour. If you have time for a bit more, consider the Birds of Panama trip, which also includes a visit to the acclaimed bird Eden in Darien National Park and the Cana field station.
By the time you’ve spent a week traveling through this bird-lover’s paradise, you’ll probably have your own notebook full of excitedly scribbled lists. Happily, the birding addiction appears to have no harmful side effects. —JS
Panama Authority of Tourism (www.visitpanama.com).
Tour: Ancon Expeditions of Panama, Calle Elvira Mendez, Eldif. El Dorado 3 ( 507/269-9415;www.anconexpeditions.com). Ask for Hernan Arauz, the company’s master naturalist and birding guide.
When to Go: Dec–May.
Tocumen International Airport, followed by 1-hr. flight or approx. 5-hr. drive to Boquete.
$$ Canopy Tower, Apartado 0832-2701 WTC ( 800/930-3397;www.canopytower.com). $ Finca Lerida Ecolodge, Boquete, Chiriqui ( 507/720-2285;www.fincalerida.com). $–$$ Los Quetzales, Guadalupe ( 507/771-2291;www.losquetzales.com).
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Birding & Deep-Sea Fishing
Island in the Middle of Nowhere
Mykines, Faroe Islands
Do you want to visit an island so remote that most people don’t know it exists? Mykines is the westernmost of the Faroe Islands, just dots in the North Atlantic Ocean northwest of Scotland and midway between Iceland and Norway. Vikings settled the Faroe Islands more than a thousand years ago and their descendants live here today in the island’s small village. Only 11 people live here year-round. Like all of the Faroe Islands, Mykines slants sharply upward and ends in steep cliffs on one side, a pattern created by blasts from giant volcanoes 60 million years ago. This dramatic landscape has proved to be an ideal home for several species of birds, and an exhilarating place to observe them.
It’s believed, at least locally, that Mykines is the mysterious “paradise of birds” that St. Brendan, the seafaring Irish monk, wrote about in the middle of the sixth century. Thousands of migratory birds fly around or perch on the steep cliffsides, which are composed of layers of volcanic basalt. Colonies of puffins live on the ledges and the swaths of green atop the cliffs. Have your camera ready, so when the puffins pose with fish in their brightly colored beaks,