Metropolitan Natural Park
Metropolitan Natural Park is in the middle of Panama City. Yes! You can see sloths, birds, and monkeys without even leaving the city :-).
The park is popular with walkers and joggers, and there are several different trails to walk. It is well sign-posted and not too big, so we were ready to walk all the trails in search of sloths and birds.
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It wasn’t long before we got our first bit of action! Yes, we found a bird 🙂
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We were pretty keen to find sloths – but they are hard to find unless you have an idea which trees to look in – they curl up into a ball and go right to the top of the tree. Yes, anyone would think that they don’t want us to find them….
Luckily for us, there were a couple of other tourists in the park who had hired a guide to take them around and find the animals for them – this was good for us, because we came across them on the trail with a scope pointed up into a tree – they had found a sloth. Yes, free sloth location services for us! 🙂
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Excited by our sloth sighting, we carried on along the trails, which were very well maintained and easy to go along.
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We knew that there were sloths and monkeys in the forest – but we were especially on the lookout for new birds – we had changed continents and there would be a whole bunch of new birds to find! 🙂
They were quite hard to spot in the dense jungle, but we managed a few…
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Happy with our bird spotting, we moved on to another trail.
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At the top of the Sendero La Cieneguita there is a viewpoint area with views in all directions. You can really see how close you are to the city, and it was a great viewpoint.
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After a bit of time at the mirador, we started our descent – there is a different trail down, so you can do a nice loop walk.
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We were still on the lookout for birds and we managed to find a cool parrot.
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Then we got a nice surprise – a bunch of Geoffroy’s tamarins – these are not tamarins that belong to a man called Geoffroy – it’s their name 🙂 In Spanish they call them ‘Monos Titi’ – Titi Monkeys. These are very small monkeys! The smallest in Central America. They only grow to be 24cm long! (not including the tail)
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It had been a very satisfying morning – sloths, birds, and tamarins – what more could you want? Maybe a lizard….. 🙂
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