Who said that a survey is boring? A bed in a rustic house, the floor of a pre-school classroom, or a cot at a health center, all of these have been places where we spent the nights while working at rural communities of the Panama Canal area. These communities comprise the small villages and towns adjacent to former or potential release sites for Harpy Eagles. We visited them during the last four months to obtain information on the level of knowledge that people have on Harpy Eagles, the reasons why these eagles are shot around human settlements.

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It was about 11 years ago when I saw an Isidor's Eagle (Oroaetus isidori), also called Black-and-Chestnut Eagle, for the first time. I was crossing the cloud forest on my way to Amazonian lowlands in Peru. From a comfortable tourist truck that was giving me a ride, I could see a fantastic scene. A few meters from the road there was a mossy tree emerging from the steep slope and on the top of it there was a nest with an Isidor's Eagle and a nestling. I remember jumping from the truck and staying while the tourists were heading to a lodge not far down the road. I stayed there for three hours just watching the eagles, and I was fascinated with the experience. By that time I was a newly graduated biologist looking for a direction for my career and my interest in birds, and especially raptors, was starting to grow. Sadly, years later I found out that the eagles were not nesting there anymore, a man had cut down the tree and since then there was not evidence of a nesting activity around. During the next years, however, I had the chance to pass by that road several times and some of those I still was lucky to see an Isidor's Eagle flying along or across the valley.

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