An exciting tour to Panama for a bonanza of brilliant butterflies to gaze at & photograph!

We’re heading to Panama in 2027 – & you can join us!

We are delighted to offer a brand new and exciting itinerary for Panama, concentrating on the beautiful cloudforests, scrubby grasslands and open habitats close to the Costa Rica border.

Panama offers some excellent butterfly habitats, ranging from rainforest and cloudforest, to grassland, fields and riversides. There are around 1800 species in the country, and we can expect to see over 200 on this 11 day tour, which is timed for the peak emergence period in May.

Our maximum group size on this tour is 6 pax. This helps to minimise trampling damage at fragile sites, and makes it considerably easier for guests to photograph and enjoy the butterflies without blocking each other’s view. It also makes travel easier as we are all in a single vehicle, it reduces check-in delays at hotels, and it means no one feels left out, either in the field or when socialising in the evenings. Singles and couples are equally welcome.

In the field, we don’t herd people together, pointing out and identifying every butterfly. Instead you are free to ramble and explore the habitats at your own pace. However, either the Greenwings guide or our local guide will always be within sight, or at least within earshot, as we wander back and forth through the habitats periodically meeting the guests and pointing out any special butterflies that they may have missed. Identifications and species lists take place in the evenings, from your cameras and laptops. Please note that the use of butterfly nets is strictly prohibited.

Our tour begins with arrival at Tocumen international airport, from where you’ll be transferred to a comfortable hotel near the airport. Early the next morning we take a domestic flight from Panama City to David, and from there we’ll use 4×4 vehicles to drive to a fabulous cloudforest lodge at Mount Totumas, near the Costa Rican border. The scenery here is simply stunning!

We’ll spend the next 4 days here, exploring the extensive trails, forest roads and open areas. The lodge also has a garden full of nectar plants that will attract hordes of butterflies. We can expect to see and photograph a wide range of species including daggerwings, glasswings, morphos, owl butterflies, longwings, banners, sisters, crescents, swallowtails, metalmarks and skippers, together with grass yellows, sulphurs and much more.

As well as tanagers, motmots, oropendulas etc, there will be many hummingbirds including violet sabrewing, green-crowned brilliant, lesser violetear and the tiny scintillant hummingbird, which are almost constantly active around the feeders and gardens.

After dark, hundreds of moths are attracted to the mercury-vapour light at the lodge. We expect to see several different giant silkmoths and hawkmoths, tiger moths, wasp-mimics, pyralids, emeralds, prominents and night-flying Hedylid butterflies as well as curious beetles, katydids, and other insects.

We’ll leave Totumas on day 7 and then head slowly down to Volcan, where we spend the next 4 nights at a comfortable lodge with a nice flowery garden. We’ll explore open scrubby habitats along the access road to Volcan Lakes, where we should see hairstreaks, pixies, and a variety of nymphalids including crescents, eighty-eights and sisters, as well as satyrs, silverspot skippers, suphurs and swallowtails.

A full day will be spend at Birding Paradise – a mix of open and semi-forested habitats where we’ll see additional species of glasswings, satyrs, sisters, longwings, dartwhites, metalmarks and skippers. Next day, we will visit the highlands at Cerro Punta which should produce some fascinating pronophiline satyrs, dartwhites, montane glasswings and mapwings.

On our penultimate day at Volcan, the schedule will be kept flexible, so that we can either revisit the most productive sites, or try somewhere new. Then, on the final day of the tour, we’ll drive back down to David, exploring more butterfly sites along the way, before catching an evening flight back to Panama City, where the tour will end.

Depending on flight times, guests can either depart that night, or can overnight (at their own expense) at an airport hotel, and fly out the next day.

Tour leader

Your tour leader is Adrian Hoskins, author of “Butterflies of the World”, “1000 Butterflies” and several scientific papers. Adrian has vast experience of neotropical butterflies, having undertaken numerous tours to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, as well as over a dozen previous tours of Peru. We’ll also have a local English-speaking butterfly guide who will put liquid baits along the trails and foliage to attract butterflies. Please note that we don’t shepherd you around in a group pointing out and identifying butterflies on the spot. Instead, we encourage you to explore the habitats at your own pace and take time enjoying your photography. In the evenings we’ll assist with identifications from your cameras and laptops, and Adrian will provide pfd files that illustrate a high percentage of the butterflies we are likely to see.

We aim to make booking and travelling with us as easy as possible, but we understand you may wish to ask us about certain elements of the tour or about your travel to get to the tour destination. To help we’ve enabled a direct email service to our tour leader, so please feel free to contact him by clicking the button below.

Identification Guide

Here is a fantastic and free resource to help guests to prepare for the tour and to help with identifications during or after it.