More animals

There's a lot of greenery around me, and so this continues to be a fun place to check out nifty animals.  I have had multiple sightings of iguanas, lizards, butterflies . . . but I never manage to get pictures of them.  

Insects

If I sit out on the patio long enough, I now start to get visited by mosquitos -- not a lot, but one or two.  I've been told mosquito season is coming.  

I still love watching these leaf cutter ants cross the paths in my shortcut.  It's easier to see the leaf than the ants, so their little trails look magical. 

Ñeques

I keep trying to get picture of ñeques (agoutis), but they must taste seriously good, because they are very very good at running away and very, very bad at pausing to have their photos taken. I've mentioned this theory of mine to locals, and they confirm that many people---especially in the countryside---eat ñeques.  The taste of a ñeque is apparently like pork.  Although I love found food, I'm guessing ñeque won't make it onto my found-food list for me!

The other day as I was leaving my office, I realized that if I turned around, facing away from the ñeque, the animal wouldn't take fright, and I could have time to get out my phone and turn on the camera.

Unfortunately, I forgot that it's so humid here that my camera fogs up when I leave the building.

Ñeque, I swear.  It wasn't foggy outside;
that's just my cold phone reacting to warm humid air.

Here's a few more ñeques, getting ready to bolt.

Birds

A neighbor who lives just down the street from me, and who happens to be a biologist, raves about this area; he says he's seen about 80 species of birds here.  This means one of two things.   Either (1) a lot more birds live about 4 or 5 houses west of me, or (2) having a PhD in biology helps you to distinguish between many varieties of flying animals.  I'll let you decide which of these things is true.  Either way, I haven't seen 80 kinds of birds.

The neighbor did point out a bird he called a "night jay", which makes a beautiful noise.  I've also seen a bunch of birds that look like parakeets, flying in swarms together.  When they lift off and fly, they make lots of "cheep" noises -- it's quite a racket -- and that reminds me that the book I'm reading talk about certain animals uses sounds to sense where they are in the flock.  

Here's a bird we saw on Cerro Ancón, and maybe it's a Harpy Eagle (the national bird of Panama).

I've seen a bunch of herons ("garzas") of many kinds, often in this cemetary (see photo below).  The bird below is different than all the others I've seen; it's much taller and more like and Edward Gorey undertaker character.  

I think it's called long-legged, long-beaked tall bird. 
(Okay, really, I have no idea what this is, but it's cool).

The buzzards, though, they hang around a bunch.  I managed to get some in-flight photos, even.

Buzzards on the ground along my short-cut walk.

Dogs

This neighborhood is full of dogs, many of which seem to have important guard-dog roles.  That is, as many places here are fenced and gated, people let their dogs out into the yard at night and bring them back into the house in the morning.  As a result,  instead of having a cock crow at sunrise, we have dogs barking and both sundown and sunrise. They seem to be mostly protecting their owners from other dogs on leashes walking by the house.  We can get quite a dog chorus up and down the street at times!

The dog who lives in the same fenced in area with me stays on the shared patio area mostly.  Toto, a little pug who is missing one eye and can barely see out of the other, doesn't bark much.  I'm not supposed to feed him, but before I found that out, I gave him chicken scraps, and now he loves hanging out at my feet whenever I sit on the patio.

Not allowed to eat table scraps, poor thing.

The next-door neighbors have a trio of dogs that are very barky. The smallest is a hairy dog with pointy ears and pointy teeth who ferociously yips at anyone who comes into view. My airbnb host hates that dog, and understandably; it's loud and persistently so.  I decided to befriend the beast (seriously, it looks almost more like a bat than a dog, or like one of the imps sitting on David Bowie's shoulders in Labyrinth).  It turns out the dog's name is Ron, and I greet him and slip him ooky chicken scraps as I wander past.  All three of the dogs, Ron included, have reduced the barking they do when I wander past, and the other two even wag their tails at me now.  

Reptiles

More crocodile sightings!  Although my biologist neighbor says this is actually a caiman, not a crocodile. The biologist says it's not dangerous.  I say, tell that to the fish.

I also finally got to see a frog!  That was courtesy of a cat, which caught the frog and dragged it into the street. (Did I mention there are a bunch of cats around, in addition to the dogs?  There are.).  I distracted the cat and let the frog hop back into the grass.  It's no wonder I hadn't seen one before; it's grey/brown, and so small it could curl up into a bag the size of the end of my thumb (between the knuckle and fingernail), with extra room to turn around.  No photos, though.