Hummingbird Feeders, Canopy Tower

A live webcam on the hummingbird feeders at Canopy Tower, a birding lodge on Semaphore Hill in Soberanía National Park, about 35 miles north of Panama City. The lodge is a converted radar tower: the US Air Force built it in 1965 to watch the skies over the Panama Canal, and after the site was handed back to Panama in 1996 it reopened as a rainforest observatory in 1999.

The feeders draw a rotating cast that a regular learns to name, white-necked jacobins, violet-bellied and blue-chested hummingbirds, the long-billed hermit with its curved beak, plus the honeycreepers and tanagers that crash the party. The birds fight, hover and vanish in the same second; the lodge hosts the camera.org.

Activity peaks in the first hours after dawn and again late afternoon (UTC−5, no daylight saving); midday heat thins the traffic. The dry season, roughly December to April, gives the steadiest light, and the wet months bring more birds to the feeders as wild flowers thin out.