Cloud Forest Trip Report I

The Isthmus That Changed the World

Before there were birds, before the frogs painted themselves with all the colors of a rainbow, before the hummingbirds were engineered by flowers - there was water. A tropical sea stretched between continents, warm and unbroken, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific in a corridor of salt and current.

Then the land rose.

Not sudden, but in fits and starts over a few millions of years. The movement of tectonic plates pushed volcanic islands upward, linking what is now North and South America. The Isthmus of Panama was born not in a single moment, but in a long geologic breath that ended one era and began another.

From above, the cloud forest reveals its defining element—not trees, but vapor. This aerial image captures the montane forest at its most vital threshold: where warm air rises from the lowlands and condenses against the flanks of the Talamanca Mountains, wrapping the canopy in a perpetual mist. These clouds are not incidental. They are the lifeblood of this ecosystem, delivering moisture directly to leaves, mosses, and epiphytes through horizontal precipitation. Every branch becomes a reservoir. Every bromeliad, an oasis. This constant saturation allows an astonishing density of plant life, which in turn supports a web of species so specialized and elevation-bound that entire evolutionary lineages exist only within a narrow band of altitude. From this perspective, the forest is not static. It breathes—drawing in cloud, exhaling birdsong, and cycling water through its veins with every passing hour.

This thin bridge of land did more than connect continents. It divided oceans. The closure of the seaway altered global currents, salting the Caribbean, cooling the Pacific. Weather systems shifted. Ice began to regather at the poles. Rainfall patterns changed across continents. The world as we know it, its climates, its coastlines, its evolutionary engines, was shaped by this single act of uplift.

With Panama in place, life began to move. Armadillos and opossums headed north. Bears and cats came south. Monkeys and hummingbirds and frogs found new forests to explore, new niches to fill, new predators to evade. This was the Great American Biotic Interchange, a mixing of faunas so complete, so rich, that it forever altered the ecological identities of two continents.

Panama remains the crucible of that exchange. A place where the creatures of the Andes meet the migrants of the Rockies. Where jaguars and tapirs walk trails traced by deer and porcupines. It is a land of convergence and reinvention.

And it is still revealing itself.

New species are discovered here every month: orchids that bloom for a single night, frogs with calls never before recorded, snakes with colors no field guide has captured. The isthmus may be narrow, but it holds within it one of the most biologically rich corridors on the planet.

And it is here, in this nexus of two worlds, that our story begins.

April 12: From Sea to Sky

The mountain held its breath.

A sheer green wall rising out of the tropics, shrouded in mist, laced in orchids and old secrets. From a distance, it looked eternal. But I had been here long enough to know better. The cloud forest was never still. It pulsed with movement, hidden and often silent, alive with the invisible labor of leaves unfurling, of tanagers slipping like sparks through the canopy, of insects whispering from moss-dark hollows.

By the time my clients arrived, I had already been living in these highlands for over a month. This was no ordinary scouting trip. I had decided months earlier to root myself more deeply in Panama, to move beyond the rhythm of field seasons and assignments, and instead commit to the slow, attentive process of living in place. I rented a house high in the mountains, on the shoulder of a volcano that wears its forest like a cloak. And in that time, I had listened to the birds, watched the clouds, memorized the trails of coatis, and studied the resplendent quetzals as they began their seasonal nesting. It had been a long courtship with this land. This time, I had stayed.

When the group arrived in David, that second largest city in the country, we left behind the coastal mangroves and drove steadily upward, climbing into the folds of the Cordillera where the air grows thinner, cooler, softer. By the time we reached nearly 6,000 feet, the forest had changed. The palms were giving way to oaks, the undergrowth thickened with elm-like trees and a profusion of bromeliads clung to bark like green fire. Here, where the tropics start to blur into something almost temperate, we paused.

Our first stop was a welcome table with a traditional Panamanian lunch. While seemingly idyllic at first, the whole of the place soon erupted in color and chaos. Tanagers with names like scarlet-rumped, silver-throated, and flame darted in and out of view like shattered gemstones reassembling midair. A wholly unique subspecies of acorn woodpecker moved in and out in a small family group. And scintillated hummingbirds, one of the smallest birds in the world and weighing no more than an American penny, moved about between a kaleidoscope of flowers. For many, this was their first taste of neotropical birds. Their eyes widened, cameras raised, and the fatigue of travel vanished as they struggled with fork in one hand and a camera in the other.

This was meant to be a buffer day. A bonus. Time to settle in, breathe the highland air, and shake off the static of airports and itineraries as we awaited our rooms down below. But in a place like this, even waiting becomes a form of immersion.

By late afternoon, the rooms were ready. We descended back to 4,500 feet to our home base for the next several days—lodgings nestled in a cradle of a valley, watched over by the dark bulk of a volcano. The temperature lingered in the 60s.

While photographs like this may be lacking in the dramatic lighting that’s possible when using flash in the field ( such as you will see in the photo of another eyelash viper below), it’s the more natural lighting scenarios such as this that tend to find their way into magazines and field guides. I’m a big proponent of dragging extraordinarily large soft boxes into the field with me. Where conventional wisdom tends to suggest that smaller micro soft boxes in the 6 - 12 inch range is practical and all that’s neccesarry, this photograph was created using a 36 inch soft box in order to create the most natural lighting possible that emulates the diffused ambient light of these forests. This workshop tends to be something of a masterclass in flash photography.

April 13: Preparation

Before we stepped foot into the forest, we took a full day to dive deep into the technical foundation required to photograph wildlife in a place like this. The cloud forests of western Panama are a realm of shifting light, dense shadows, and fast-moving subjects; unforgiving to the unprepared.

That’s why I’ve long since built these classroom sessions into the beginning of every workshop.

We spent the day dialing in autofocus systems for each photographer’s camera; discussing the differences between subject recognition, tracking modes, AF area selections, and the benefits of back-button focus versus shutter-based AF. This wasn’t just about flipping switches however, it was about understanding how and why these systems work the way they do, and how to adapt them for specific situations in the field.

Low light photography was another major focus. In a forest where ISO 12,800 is often the baseline, we explored the balance between noise and exposure. The classroom became a proving ground where we could discuss and learn without the added pressure of a rare bird or elusive mammal disappearing into the foliage.

From there, we turned to flash. Starting with basic principles like flash duration, guide numbers, and the inverse square law, we moved into more nuanced territory: blending ambient and artificial light, using fill flash without overpowering the scene, and deploying off-camera setups with softboxes to control shadows and direction. We also covered the practical side: flash modifiers, stands, triggers, batteries, and the logistics of carrying and setting up this equipment in the field.

Some of this material was review for a few in the group. For others, it was entirely new. By the end of the day, questions were more refined, polished, rooted in a better understanding. In a place like this, with fleeting subjects and volatile light, that kind of preparation makes all the difference.

April 14: Coiled Light and Living Color

Morning. We ascended in elevation to the small hamlet at the edge of the forest where we lunched and had photographed tanagers. This was our first full day in the field, and our focus turned to the microcosm: amphibians and reptiles, Panama’s lesser-known but spectacular emissaries of biodiversity. Our subjects were tiny, venomous, radiant.

The definition of workshop seems to be lost to many these days. Perhaps it rolls off the tongue better than words like “tour,” or maybe it invokes a notion of higher purpose that’s easily coopted for the sake of marketing. Whatever the case, the trips I lead are designed to educate and expand one’s knowledge in the field. As such, the purpose of the day was to put theory into practice, offering everyone the opportunity to work through the previous day’s discussions of flash and autofocus and technical minutia in a semi-controlled environment as we worked with a local herpetologist before being thrown to the wolves – or jaguars.  

We began with one of Panama’s living gems: Oophaga pumilio, the strawberry poison frog. Known for its dazzling array of color morphs, this species is a textbook case of aposematism: warning coloration at its most flamboyant. Over the course of the morning, we photographed multiple color morphs that I normally drag clients across an entire archipelago of islands on the Caribbean side of things to find. Each frog, no larger than a thumbnail, demanded macro precision, delicate depth-of-field control, and attention to the direction and softness of light. These were not snapshots; they were studies in behavior as we recreated the particulars of each species natural history in field studios.

The vibrant toxicity of poison dart frogs is one of nature’s most striking examples of chemical defense—and it begins not in the frog, but in its diet.

These amphibians are not born poisonous. In captivity, where their diet is controlled, they lose their toxicity entirely. In the wild, however, they feed on a specialized menu of ants, mites, and other arthropods that contain alkaloid compounds—bitter-tasting, often neurotoxic molecules that accumulate in the frog’s skin. Over generations, dart frogs evolved the ability to sequester these toxins without harm, transforming their very bodies into a chemical weapon.

This defense works twofold. First, the alkaloids themselves are potent—some capable of disrupting ion channels in muscle and nerve tissue, others affecting heart rate or causing paralysis. Second, the frogs advertise their danger through brilliant coloration: reds, blues, yellows, and oranges that blaze against the forest floor. This is aposematism in its purest form—a warning to predators that says, clearly and unequivocally, “I am not worth the risk.”

What’s remarkable is how this chemical strategy varies from frog to frog. Each population of Oophaga pumilio—even those just miles apart—feeds on a slightly different assemblage of toxic prey, giving rise to not only different color morphs but different chemical profiles. Their skin is a living map of their ecosystem.

In this way, poison dart frogs are more than just photogenic subjects. They are a mirror of their food web, a signal post of evolutionary adaptation, and a vivid reminder that beauty in nature is often laced with danger.

Then came the serpents.

Bothriechis torvus is not just a new species of eyelash viper—it is a reminder of how little we truly know about the rainforests of Central America. Officially described by herpetologists in 2024, this serpent had remained hidden in plain sight for decades, misidentified or overlooked in regions thought to be biologically well-explored. Unlike its more flamboyant cousin, Bothriechis schlegelii, torvus lacks the vivid coloration that usually signals its kind. Instead, it moves through the forest with ghostlike discretion, its muted scales perfectly matched to the shadows of bromeliads and heliconia. The recognition of torvus as a distinct species underscores Panama’s status as a global hotspot of biodiversity, where new vertebrates are still being described yearly, and where even familiar forest paths can yield secrets written in scales and silence.

The eyelash palm pitviper (Bothriechis schlegelii) is perhaps the most diversely colored species of reptile in the world. From electric yellow to mossy green, from rust to rose to ash-gray, this snake wears the palette of the rainforest itself. As ambush predators, they depend concealment, waiting motionless for hours, sometimes days, for unsuspecting prey to pass within striking range.

That morning, we worked with individuals curled delicately atop heliconia or cloaked in shadow beneath bromeliads. But one species stole our breath: Bothriechis torvus, a newly described species, a relative of the more familiar schlegelii. More slender and ghostlike in appearance, with muted hues and a strikingly refined build, torvus (meaning fierce in Latin), has only recently emerged in the scientific literature, and its known range is still hotly debated. To photograph such a snake was not just rare, it was borderline historic.

Technically, this day was a masterclass in artificial light: managing specular highlights on reflective scales, balancing flash and ambient exposure, and softening shadows with careful light placement. But the higher ridges of the cloud forest awaited, a sky-bound kingdom of birds found nowhere else on Earth.

Tomorrow, we would climb.

April 15: Into the Mist

At first light, clouds spilled through the canopy like a river of water through fingers. It was the kind of morning that rewrites one’s sense of elevation, where sky and slope cease to be separate – part consequence of the two oceans divided by a mountain, part evapotranspiration, that litteral breath of the forest.

We climbed slowly, the engines grinding against gravity as we pushed to nearly 8,000 feet. Bromeliads multiplied. Orchids clung to branches like punctuation marks in a sentence written in moss. Every surface, ever stone, tree, even the barest twig had been colonized by life. This was not just forest. This was an aerial reef of vegetation, suspended in air and held together by mist.

Our first stop was a purpose built blind peering out into a world of moss and entropy. The forest here was denser here, quieter. The rare ochraceous pewee fluttered into range. Collared redstarts bounced through the understory like flickering embers. Striped woodcreepers, black-faced solitaires, and flame-throated warblers, moved in and out. Endemic insectivores, almost all of them, shaped by altitude and isolation atop these islands in the sky.

Long ago, during the cooler epochs of Earth’s history, temperate forest blanketed much of this region, stretching low across what is now the tropics. But as the climate warmed again, those cooler forests began to recede, climbing higher and higher in elevation in search of refuge from the heat. In their place, tropical forests surged upward, blanketing the foothills and valleys below.

Some animals adapted to the rising heat. Others disappeared. And still others, the warblers, the redstarts, the tiny flycatchers and tree hunters that required the temperate understories and cooler climates retreated upwards with the forest.

They became marooned, ecologically imprisoned on the rooftop of the tropics.

Today, the Talamanca Mountains are a string of sky islands, fragments of ancient forest habitat, cut off from one another by vast seas of tropical lowland. Species that once had broad ranges became restricted to these isolated ridges. Over time, their genes diverged. Behavior shifted. Plumage changed. And what began as a retreat ended in speciation.

This is why so many birds here are endemic, not just to Panama, but to a single cordillera, a single mountain, sometimes even a single slope. They are living relics, fingerprints of an older world.

The Collared Redstart—often called the “amigo de hombre,” or “man’s friend,” by locals—is a sprite of the cloud forest, known for its fearless curiosity and animated foraging style. Dressed in a striking combination of lemon yellow, charcoal black, and a chestnut cap, it flits through the underbrush in search of insects, often trailing behind mammals or even humans to snatch up prey stirred by movement. Like other members of the Myioborus genus, it uses its tail in a flamboyant fan—flashing white outer feathers to startle insects from their hiding places in moss and leaf litter.

After lunch, we split the group.

Half were guided into a blind perched at the edge of a ravine, eye-level with a resplendent quetzal nest I had scouted before the workshop and photographed the year before. Access was limited so as not to disturb the birds and the blind was built for three.

Few birds carry the cultural gravity of the resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno). To the Maya and Aztec civilizations, it was the sacred bird for which gods were fashioned after and the harbinger to the end of this world. The male’s shimmering emerald tail feathers, which can reach more than a meter in length, were prized more than gold and used in royal headdresses and religious ceremonies. But to kill a quetzal was to invite catastrophe; legend held that the bird would die of grief in captivity. And so, it became a symbol of liberty itself, a creature that could not live without freedom.

To witness a breeding pair in the wild is to step into cosmology. There is something ceremonial about their movements, an otherworldly grace that feels less like flight and more like a blessing passed on the wind. Each time the male arrived at the nest, there was a reverent hush in the blind. Cameras click like prayer wheels. The forest itself seems to draw back in quiet recognition.

The other half of the group remained higher up the mountain, where we set up a multi-flash station for hummingbirds once I hiked back after installing the first group in the quetzal blind. The cloud forest is not merely home to these birds, it is their crucible. Scientists now believe that hummingbirds evolved here, in these cool, wet mountain belts where flowering plants faced the constant challenge of cold and fluctuating temperatures. To thrive, those plants needed specialists, creatures with fast metabolisms and better thermal regulation than insects.

And so, the flowers shaped the birds.

In the vertical labyrinth of the cloud forest, where flowers bloom at every level and nectar flows unevenly through the canopy, the Striped-tailed Hummingbird (Eupherusa eximia) has carved out a niche built on subtlety and speed. Smaller and lighter than many of its highland relatives, this species excels in maneuverability—its reduced mass allowing it to hover longer, feed more delicately, and access nectar sources that larger, more aggressive hummingbirds cannot reach.

Over millennia, the hummingbird’s form became a tool honed by the needs of the flora around it. Beaks elongated. Tongues grew to such enormous lengths for accessing nectar that they wrap around the skulls and between the eyes of the birds when not in use. Hovering allowed for efficient access to flower openings. Aerial agility let them defend feeding territories amid vertical terrain. And here in the cloud forest, that evolutionary dance has yielded one of the densest concentrations of hummingbird diversity on the planet.

That afternoon we photographed a cornucopia of different species; fiery-throated hummingbirds with gorgets that light up like fire alongside green-crowned brilliants, violet sabrewings, and the blue-tailed white-throated mountaingems found only here. I worked with three to five strobes at a time. And in one station, we mounted a white 5x7 backdrop to create high-key images; portraits in negative space that stripped away the forest’s chaos to reveal the purity of form and color that is the evolutionary marvel of hummingbirds.

Then something shifted.

The Ornate Hawk-Eagle (Spizaetus ornatus) is a raptor carved from myth—its upright crest, barred flanks, and fierce golden eyes echoing a lineage of forest-dwelling predators that span the Neotropics. As an apex hunter of dense, tropical canopies, it specializes in ambush: bursting from cover with astonishing force to snatch arboreal prey ranging from monkeys to toucans. Though widespread in distribution, it is rarely seen—its presence more often suspected than confirmed, a phantom of the upper canopy. These birds are not typically found at such elevations. Yet here she was—still, sovereign, and startlingly close—reminding us that the boundaries we place on species are often based more on maps than on the ever-shifting realities of nature.

It was one of the guides who saw it first: a shape, still and solid, perched on a moss-covered branch just up the mountain from us. Not a silhouette in flight, not a passing shadow, but Spizaetus ornatus, the ornate hawk-eagle, watching us through the forest.

There are raptors more famous, more studied. But few are more elusive. This is a bird of lowland forests, of broken canopy and distant river valleys, not a species typically found at elevation. Yet, here it was. And for the next several minutes, we photographed one of the rarest and most difficult-to-document raptors in the Neotropics.

By evening, we descended in near silence, winding our way back down roads that demanded modified 4x4 vehicles. Tomorrow would bring more, more hummingbirds, more quetzals. But for now, it was enough to sit with what we’d seen.

April 16: A Rotation of Reverence

Clouds hung low across the ridgeline, parting now and then to reveal brief windows of light, cool beams that filtered through the moss-draped canopy and fell like blessings onto the forest floor. This was our second full day in the forest, and by now the group had settled into a rhythm.

Each morning, we divided into smaller teams. Some returned to the quetzal blind, tucked into the cliffside like a hidden chapel, where the male arrived again and again with offerings of fruit and insect, his tail trailing like a sacred ribbon through the trees. Over the next few days, we gave everyone in the group the chance to witness and photograph this exchange of parental duties.

Endemic to the highland cloud forests of Costa Rica and western Panama, the Flame-throated Warbler (Oreothlypis gutturalis) is a canopy-dwelling insectivore adapted to life in cool, montane broadleaf forests above 2,000 meters. It is most often found in the upper strata of the forest, foraging methodically among moss-covered branches and epiphyte-laden limbs in search of caterpillars and small arthropods. This species is a frequent member of mixed-species foraging flocks—a cooperative strategy that increases foraging efficiency and predator awareness in these visually complex habitats. Its vivid throat, a diagnostic field mark, may function in short-range signaling within flocks, especially in the dim light conditions common to its habitat. The species is believed to have diverged from more widespread warbler lineages during periods of climatic isolation in the Talamanca Mountains, where its restricted range and specialized foraging behavior reflect the evolutionary pressures of a narrow ecological niche.

Meanwhile, I continued to work with the rest of the group on endemic birds and hummingbird flash setups. In the background, the ornate hawk-eagle remained nearby. We saw her again, this time perched deeper in the foliage, barely visible through the veil leaves. She had not left. And the guides, experienced and reverent, were beginning to wonder if she might nest nearby.

April 17: The Sacred and the Small

We moved more quietly. We paused longer. The rush of first impressions had faded, replaced by a deeper kind of seeing: one born of stillness, of waiting, of noticing. On this morning, clouds clung low and close, wrapping the ridgelines in a silence so complete it felt like being underwater. Every footstep in wet leaf litter, every wingbeat of a hummingbird felt amplified.

Quetzals continued to produce. More hummingbirds.

After lunch, we changed gears.

Heading down to lower elevations, we re-entered the realm of tanagers and the other frugivores. And this time we were rewarded with yet a new species of hummingbird – the snowy-bellied (Amazilia edward). By now, we had seen and photographed scintillant, volcano, lesser violetear, Talamanca, green-crowned brilliant, violet sabrewing, stripe-tailed, blue-tailed white-throated mountaingem, snowy-bellied, and the fiery-throated hummingbirds. The only species we had not been able to find that I had hoped for was the magenta-throated woodstar.

I counted it a success.

The Resplendent Quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) is a living relic of Central America’s montane cloud forests—an obligate frugivore of the Lauraceae family, whose life history is intimately tied to the fruiting cycles of wild avocados. Found only in the highlands from southern Mexico to western Panama, it nests in cavities excavated in decaying trees softened by epiphytes and humidity. This image, made the year before during a quiet morning of scouting, marks the first time we discovered this nest site—a find that would shape the following season’s workshop.

April 18: Descent

We left the mountains by air.

From the small airport in David, our group boarded a morning flight that lifted us above the intricacy of Central America’s most ecologically important mangrove forest. The Pacific Ocean and it’s string of islands like a pearl necklace, unfolded to the right while the cloud forest, high atop the mountains, loomed off to the left. As the plane climbed, we could see the volcanic massif recede into the northern horizon, the last fingers of the Cordillera slipping beneath the clouds.

And then came the shift.

Below us, jungle gave way to geometry. Steel and glass replaced quetzals and hummingbirds. Panama City rose from the coast like a mirage, its skyline sharp and vertical, more Hong Kong than Latin America, a collection of gleaming towers perched on the edge of the Pacific. It’s always a jarring contrast for me, even after years of making this same journey. The cloud forest felt impossibly far away now, as if it belonged to a different century.

But we didn’t stay in the city.

We skirted its margins, trading pavement for lowland forests as quickly as possible, high-rise for riverside. By afternoon, we arrived in Gamboa, a village cradled in rainforest at the edge of the Panama Canal. Here, nature and infrastructure intertwine like vines around a rusting trellis – both literally and figuratively. Monkeys crossed utility lines overhead. Container ships passed behind spectacle caimans. This is where the Isthmus breathes deepest.

Our new base of operations sat near the confluence of the Chagres River and the Canal itself. The elevation was low, the humidity high. The birds were different. The light was different. Even the air was denser. We were no longer on the roof of the continent. We were in its pulsing heart.

To be continued. . .