On My Mind: Adventures in Panama

What’s your escape?
Every once in a while you have to do something that has nothing whatever to do with daily life and work, because if you don’t, your brains lock up. For me, it’s travel. Bird-watching travel. Particularly in the tropics.

So in February I took time off from spreadsheets and e-mail and deadlines and a Boston winter featuring one big snowstorm after another, and signed up with the Massachusetts Audubon Society for a birders’ trip to Panama. There were seven of us—our tour leader, Sue McCallum, director of a group of Mass Audubon wildlife preserves; two couples and a friend from MIT who had created high-tech companies and sold them and now apparently devote themselves largely to bird-watching; Polly, a wildlife expert from Tennessee who was hoping she could manage being solely among Yankees for the better part of two weeks; and me.