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Neotropic Cormorant occupies virtually all of the American tropics, ranging from the extreme
southwestern United States to southern Chile. In September of 2006 I found this bird perched
on a branch over a fast mountain stream in El Valle, located in the central Panamanian foothills.
It struck me as quite incongruous, as I generally find cormorants around open bodies of water, and this individual
looked rather silly clinging to the branch with its webbed feet. The guides at the Canopy Lodge told me that
this bird had shown up a couple of months before, and they believed that it had aggressively chased off the local Sunbitterns,
an enigmatic and sought-after species, one for which most birders would trade all of the Neotropic Cormorants in the world!
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