Welcome: I'm Charlie Thompson

Panama is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. Its rich topography includes rainforests, volcanoes, beaches, and oceans—and it's a crucial link in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. As you would expect, the birding here is spectacular.

The Blue Angels are the world's most skilled, daring, and legendary flight demonstration team. For more than 20 years, alongside my wife and super-spotter Gina, it has been a privilege to photograph these masters of the sky.

For a country the size of South Carolina, Panama's diversity is astonishing. With influences ranging from African/Caribbean to Spanish — alongside indigenous tribes living deep in the jungle — the people are as colorful as the tropics. The menagerie includes a sizeable expat population.

If you hang around birds as much as I do, eventually they'll let you hang nearby while they go about their bird-ness. Their activity remarkably involves a lot of fighting — but also industrious, hilarious, bizarre, and tender behavior.

A sampler of buildings and mostly people-free scenes around Panama. Old World meets Future World, sandwiched between the world's two largest oceans.

This group shows birds in more intimate settings with subtle, diffused lighting — similar to what you would see in an indoor photography studio or museum exhibit.

Panama is a hotbed of tropical wildlife, including leisurely sloths, deafening howler monkeys, toothsome caimans and crocodiles, reptiles large and small, and the fearsome jaguar. It's a jungle out there!