Xenornis

My excuse for the low activity in this blog over the last couple of months, besides the yearly lull in birding before the fall migrant season, is that I’ve been hard at work, together with fellow Audubon Panamá member and fellow blogger Jan Axel Cubilla , on revamping the base checklists and filters for the Republic of Panama on eBird, part of the new eBird Centroamérica portal . Yes, we are now regional editors. Fame and fortune, here we come! Quoth the Cornell University press report : Ithaca, NY--The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has launched eBird Centroamérica , a regional Internet portal providing birders, scientists, and the general public with open access to its worldwide eBird database. eBird is a citizen-science project collecting bird observations to document spatial and temporal patterns in bird distribution. Central America is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, with about 1,160 species of birds. eBird already includes 2 million observation records for the 7 count

Charles Davies, Jan Axel Cubilla, Dan Wade and I made a trip to the Cerro Santiago and Cerro Colorado area from August 8 to 11. The road is now asphalted all the way to Entrada de Hacha (correct name for "Acha" in Where to Find Birds in Panamá) on the Continental Divide, ie beyond the area on the flanks of Cerro Santiago commonly—but erroneously—referred to as Cerro Colorado, where sightings have been made in previous years of the two endemics, Yellow-green Finch and Glow-throated Hummingbird.  We continued beyond Entrada de Hacha on the rough track that after a kilometer or so goes over the real Cerro Colorado and thence to the village of Ratón, where it ends. We stayed right on the Continental Divide at a basic cabin we have dubbed the Yellow-green Finch Ecolodge, about 4 km beyond Entrada de Hacha. Accommodation here costs $5.00 per night—great views and great birds! At and near the cabin we had good sightings every day of the finch and other good birds su