Third Encounter with the King of the Hill

There are sightings you jot down in the logbook, and there are others that embed themselves in memory. The king vulture that Maicol spotted soaring above cerro El Peligro on a recent morning belongs to the second kind — all the more so because this is not the first time, nor the second, but the third time he has watched it glide over that very same spot. Above the hill it is common to see dozens, sometimes hundreds, of black vultures tracing slow circles in the warm air, but the Sarcoramphus papa — its white chest and broad black wings open wide against the blue sky — is another story entirely: a rare visitor that seems to have grown fond of that particular hill. The day's route started from finca El Paraíso and climbed up to cerro El Peligro, along rocky trails hemmed in by dense vegetation at that peculiar moment when the forest has not yet made up its mind between dry season and wet. Along the way, Maicol also came across three green parrots perched on a branch — their tails a flash of yellow and burning orange amid the foliage —, a rusty-breasted nunlet (Nonnula frontalis) with its dark, bright eye, a large raptor gliding in silence, a reddish squirrel climbing with nimble ease, and the open pods of a legume from the genus Ormosia revealing their two-toned seeds, black and white, like small wild jewels. A full day, by any measure.