March 9, 2009

6:45 pm (REFRESHMENTS!)

Duval Auditorium, University Medical Center, Tucson, Arizona

The world-famous Canopy Tower.

Panama may be small, covering only 30,000 square miles at the narrow waist of Central America; but this slender isthmus links two continents—and their birds. With more than 1,000 species occupying an area slightly smaller than the state of Indiana, Panama makes air-castle dreams come true for visiting naturalists. The birder’s destination of choice for well over a hundred years, Panama was thoroughly explored in the nineteenth centuries as part of the decades-long search for land and sea routes joining the oceans, and the results of those efforts—political, social, and technological—continue to influence ecotourism in the New World tropics today.

Join Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS, for an illustrated exploration of the intersections of north and south, ocean and forest, past and present in Panama.

Senior Leader Stuart Elsom is also a distinguished photographer, and you’ll find his tours and travels beautifully documented at his website.

Stuart will be co-leading this year’s tour to the warbler hotspots of Ohio and Ontario, and I suspect that we can look forward to some particularly fine images from Point Pelee, Crane Creek, and the other famous midwestern migrant traps.

Gary Rosenberg’s perennially splendid October tour to the Manu Biosphere Reserve and Machu Picchu in Peru just got even better.

We’ve moved our accommodation for Day Five from a comfortable but occasionally rainy campsite to Wayquecha Lodge, where our cabins feature bathrooms, hot water–and beds!

The spectacular Sunbittern at Manu Wildlife Centre. Photo: Gary Rosenberg

It’s here!

Photo: Gary Rosenberg; Design: Julie Hecimovich

Alongside our full range of regularly scheduled tours worldwide, WINGS also has a long history of arranging private birding experiences for visitors to our home base in Tucson. We’re not alone in providing guiding services here: the four counties that make up the birder’s southeast Arizona are home to a large number of excellent and experienced professional guides.

To make it easier for traveling birders to connect with the best of those local guides, WINGS has created a new online reservation service. Free to all users, AZ-Birding.com lets you select your dates and, if you wish, specify a guide; the new website also provides some very useful trip-planning tools to help you get the most out of your visit.

Once you’ve made your reservation, all further arrangements, including payment details, are handled directly by you and your guide. There is no additional charge to you for making your reservation at AZ-Birding.com.

Now’s a great time to try our service out. In just the past few days, a Blue Mockingbird has appeared near Douglas, the Patagonia Sinaloa Wren is still being seen, Black-capped Gnatcatchers have been reported from several locations, Patagonia Lake has hosted a Rufous-backed Robin…it just never ends here in southeast Arizona.

If you have any questions, please give me a call at the WINGS office, or simply visit AZ-Birding.com for full details on using this new service.

- Rick Wright, Managing Director

One of the things I like most about the WINGS leaders is the breadth of their knowledge and enthusiasm: from music to geology, from reptiles to sculpture, from chocolate to butterflies.

Our popular “Birds and…” tours find the leaders combining their passion for things feathered with their “outside” interests. In addition to their formal WINGS tours, many of our leaders share their expertise with local and regional groups, too.

For example, Senior Leader Rich Hoyer will be conducting two field trips for the Southeast Arizona Butterfly Association in the next weeks: the first on February 21 to Pima Canyon, the next on March 14 to Montosa Canyon. The latter site is famous among birders for its Black-capped Gnatcatchers, but both locations promise butterflies aplenty.

Gray Hairstreak: Which end up? Photo: Rick Wright

For more information about either of these hikes, visit the SEABA website.

A Blue Mockingbird was discovered today near Douglas, Arizona. If accepted by the Arizona Birds Committee, this will be the state’s fourth record; two of the others were long-lingering birds, giving hope that perhaps this one, too, will remain chaseable into the spring.

Blue Mockingbird, on our tour to Texas's Rio Grande Valley. Photo: Michael O'Brien

Tour Manager Kathi McIvor has returned from this year’s terrifically successful Space Coast Festival, bearing photos that make the rest of us wish we’d gone, too!

Ding Darling NWR

Roseate Spoonbill is one of those emblematic Florida birds–just exotic enough to let you know that you truly have left the frozen north behind.

Intercoastal Waterway, Titusville

Or have you? Slushy ice formed this year on the waters of the Intracoastal Waterway, bewildering birds and birders alike. But everyone got over it, thanks to sights like this fine Anhinga sunning in the mangroves at Ding Darling.

Ding Darling

Join us next year at one of the best and busiest bird festivals around.