I want to thank you for your hospitality and that of your most excellent staff at the Canopy Tower. I could not have imagined a more welcoming atmosphere in which to have an IFO workshop. The accommodations were extremely comfortable, the food outstanding, and the location atop Semaphore Hill quite remarkable. You have indeed done wonders in restoring the Tower and making it into a first rate ecotourist and conservation facility.

I must also single out your two guides, Carlos and José. There are fine young men, talented and personable. They augmented the workshop in an immense way and it was really fun to get to know both of them. I cannot recall having an easier time anywhere working out logistics with local guides. They are fine representatives of their country and what you are trying to achieve with the Tower.

The workshop featured relaxed birding and classroom sessions with evening slide lectures. The spacious "great room" atop the Tower was ideal for our conversations, classes, and slide-illustrated lectures. I very much appreciated that we were the only group resident at the Tower during the workshop. That made a huge difference in helping me to plan when to do various classes, etc.

I think it was Woody Allen who said half of success is just "showing up." The location of the Tower in that wonderful rainforest in one of the most historically important ornithological study areas in the tropical world makes "showing up" at the Tower almost assure the successful impact of the workshop on the participants. Our field conversations, our chats at dinner, and our often animated discussions over wine before dinner, all within the actual forest itself, monkeys outside, toucans calling, Potoo roosting nearby, made the points I wanted to make in bringing ABA folks to Panamá. It is fun to be talking about tropical predation and look out and see a perched White Hawk. It's very meaningful to participants to see toucans and tanagers feasting on Cecropia fruits even as I talk of fruiting behavior of birds.

Were I to repeat the workshop I would like to explore the possibility of an all-day outing to Barro Colorado. It is such a profoundly important place in research that I think it would greatly add to the workshop experience.

Muchas gracias Raúl. We had a wonderful experience.