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White-thighed Swallow is a rather local neotropical swallow, one which I had not seen until
my visit to El Valle, Panama, in July of 2005. The Canopy Lodge's guides could identify it my call, but
I was generally able to identify it only as a uniformly dark swallow species. Late one afternoon we lucked into
a few perched birds near the Lodge's construction site, and I was able to capture some decent film of one of the birds
showing off the signature white feathering on the tibia. Michael Gaston Harvey, a Cornell University undergrad in residence
at the Canopy Lodge for the summer, found an active White-thighed Swallow nest, which apparently had not yet been described
to science. Contrary to A Field Guide to the Birds of Panama, which guesses
that "they apparently nest in dead holes in trees", White-thighed Swallow has a hanging, basket-shaped nest.
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