science

Between early October and mid-November an international team of about 40 experienced birdwatchers counted more than 2.7 million migratory raptors --- mostly broad-winged hawks, turkey vultures, Swainson’s hawks and Mississippi kites --- passing through Panama. Those data collected will be added to information collected at other points along the Trans-American Flyway, to the results of such surveys as the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas season bird count, and to other historical materials to give us a better idea of bird population dynamics within Panama and along the route that birds from North America take to their wintering areas in Central and South America.

At an October 27 press conference at the Smithsonian’s Tupper Center --- which was much better attended by people from academia than by journalists --- the Smithsonian’s Stanley Heckadon hailed the cooperation among scientific and environmentalist groups and questioned the priorities of media organizations. “Among all the political gossip and the latest scandals,” he lamented, “nature is ignored.”

A cooperative effort by the Panama Audubon Society, Pennsylvania’s Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the Peregrine Fund, the Panamanian Center for Social Studies and Action (CEASPA), the University of Panama and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, with additional financial backing from the Gamboa Rainforest Resort and the Canopy Tower, the effort marked a milestone in isthmian ornithology, a stepping stone toward the Birdlife International world birding festival that will take place in Panama next year.

One short-term practical application of the study will the documentation needed to get international recognition for certain critical niches, according to the Panama Audubon Society’s Rosabel Miró. Noting that the National Environmental Authority is trying to get some wetlands east of Panama City declared world wildlife heritage sites, she explained that bird census data are needed to back the claim. Once a site is listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) certain weak international legal restrictions against its destruction will apply, but much stronger will be the moral and political protections.

(Panama saw that earlier this year when Mireya Moscoso tried to push a road through a listed area, the Volcan Baru National Park. Although all the political strings were hers to pull, Panamanian society --- including members of her own party --- would not tolerate the devastation of a park certified by UNESCO as a world heritage site and in the end it didn’t happen.)

Miró noted Panama’s choke point position along the single major flyway in the Western Hemisphere, which makes us one of only four places in the world through which more than one million raptors migrate. By measuring the phenomenon and publishing the results, she said “we’re not only promoting wildlife to Panamanians, but promoting Panama as a tourist destination.”

The Hawk Mountain Sanctuary’s Keith L. Bildsteins explained the nature of a flyway and the requirements of migrating raptors.

The notion that migrating birds just take to the sky, flap their wings and head in a straight line for where they are going is a misconception, he noted. Raptors in particular fly over land because they are large bodied, large-winged creatures that once in the air don’t actually spend much energy flapping their wings. Instead the soar high into the air on thermal upwellings, then glide over to the next thermal in the direction they’re heading. But thermals are phenomena that happen over land and not over open water.

Bildsteins said that raptors don’t eat much while migrating, which is one behavior that distinguishes them from migrating songbirds that expend a lot of energy flapping their wings and thus must find ample food along their way. When birds of prey and scavengers pass through here, “they’re using solar energy” by letting air currents rather than their muscles to lift them. He added that observations indicate that the same raptors behave differently in tropical areas than they do in temperate zones and that this is the subject of scientific interest.

Opining that the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is a good thing for his home state of Pennsylvania, Bildsteins said that such a program would be even more beneficial for Panama. “This raptor conservation program in Panama is a Holy Grail for conservationists,” he concluded.

Dr. George Angher, an ornithologist and the scientific director for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, commented that “few people in Panama are aware of this amazing event that happens overhead twice a year.”

This reporter wasn’t. He had long operated under the mistaken assumption that all those birds circling over Ancon Hill were full-time residents, local vultures who smelled something disgusting below, for example at the Legislative Assembly at the foot of the hill.

But Angher said that the local turkey vultures are of a different sub-species that can be distinguished by sight and that the large numbers of birds circling above Ancon Hill this past October and November were migrants passing through on the draft that flows upward when ocean breezes get deflected by the hill. Our own vultures’ habits are somewhat mysterious, he added. It is believed that they may make a little migration of their own, to somewhere in northern South America.



Also in this section:
Panama raptor census
Violence against women and AIDS
People and animals in pre-Columbian Panama

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