Florida, Day 5

DISCLAIMER: all species identifications herein are the best I could do with standard reference materials. I claim absolutely no authority, because I haven’t got any.

After a leisurely breakfast Tuesday morning, we headed over to Sanibel Island. We stopped first at a boat storage facility so I could get a picture of four stories of boats. I found this amazing. Jane and Jan told me that they have a giant fork lift that they put under the boats to hoist them to their resting positions. I would have loved to have seen it in action. So many questions remain. Is this seasonal storage or do people just do this whenever they get a wild hair to go boating for the day? How much does it cost vs. renting a slip in the water? I will likely never know

Four stories of boat storage

Sanibel was much as I remembered it, another island with one road going down the middle.

The Sanibel I remember

Our first stop was Pond Apple Park Trail. There were four ponds there that had something to do with water treatment. There was a plaque explaining how floating vegetation helped clean the water but a conspicuous absence of floating vegetation. Another mystery.

Just as we came out of the wooded area to the ponds, a bald eagle flew by. Focusing on flying birds is challenging, even (or especially) with autofocus. So here’s another crappy, out-of-focus picture.

Crappy picture of a bald eagle

A flock of brown pelicans lounged along the bank.

Pelicans of leisure

There was also a large male iguana sunning himself. I know it’s a male from the dewlap under his chin. He uses it for defense and posturing to other males in the competition for females. Is it not terrifying?

Iguana sunning on the bank

A double-crested cormorant swam in the pond. Unlike the straight beak of the anhinga, the coromorant beak hooks in the front. The orange of the beak and around the eye is diagnostic of the double-crested. The crests only (I guess) appear during the breeding season.

Double-crested cormorant

This is a common moorhen. Another imponderable: what do they call the males? “Hen” usually refers to females. “Cock” is the male, as in peafowl being made up of peacocks and peahens. The woodcock is another anomaly. There don’t seem to be any woodhens.  

Common moorhen

I saw a wood stork in the distance and walked all the way around the far side of the pond to get closer to it. As usual, I started taking pictures early so I would still have something if I spooked it. Like the baby alligator at Corkscrew, I did not realize I had photographed three Florida redbelly turtles on the bank in front of the wood stork.

Three redbelly turtles on the bank with a wood stork above

A snail inched its way along the sand of the trail. I wished it well on its journey, hoping that it would get where it was going before it shriveled up and died. Snail + dry sand = bad situation.

A snail on the sand

I found another redbelly turtle closer to the trail.

Florida redbelly turtle

I got a bit closer to the wood stork, along with ibis and an anhinga.

Left to right: anhinga, ibis, wood stork

Three pelicans took turns splashing around in the water.

Pelicans bathing

I was so absorbed in watching the pelicans that I almost walked into this male anhinga in breeding plumage standing on a fence post. No kidding, I could have touched it. I didn’t even need the telephoto lens to take this picture. Note the striking turquoise outline around his eye. It was really impressive in person.

Male anhinga calling to his love

He may have been calling to this female a couple of fenceposts down the line. She didn’t seem impressed.

An unimpressed female anhinga

I tried and tried to catch a pelican flying, as they are, in my opinion, at their most beautiful in the air. Seeing soaring white pelicans over the prairie potholes of North Dakota took my breath away. Finally, my persistence paid off.

Brown pelican in flight

As we walked back to the car, we spotted a red-bellied woodpecker on a palm tree.

Red-bellied woodpecker

On to the J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge. The visitor center is cleverly decorated. The hallway outside the restroom has paintings and sculptures imitating what we could see from underneath the water. This photo shows an alligator and some dabbling ducks. There was also the front end of a pelican diving for a fish.

The ceiling outside the bathroom, simulating the view from under the water

This manatee and her baby were on the wall, made of recycled bicycle tires.

Manatees made of recycled bicycle tires

The gift shop had jackets made of pull tabs from soda cans held together with thread. I was sorely tempted, but couldn’t bring myself to spend $324.99 for it even though I knew that the number of hours someone spent putting it together made it worth far more than the asking price. Note also the matching purse. Where would a person get all those pull tabs?

Jacket and matching purse made of soda can pull tabs

While it is possible to explore Ding Darling in other ways (hiking, kayaking, biking, etc.), we drove the roads in the car. There were white pelicans and cormorants on a sand bar.

White pelicans and cormorants

Much of the road was lined with mangroves. I admire mangroves. They are perfectly adapted to their environment. Their seeds float if they land in water or stab into the ground if the tide is out. They sprout new shoots from roots and roots from stems. Here you can see the branches growing straight down to the water.

Mangroves holding the whole ecosystem together.

We saw blue and green herons, but I posted photos of them yesterday. Here’s a great egret.

Great egret

This might be a diamondback turtle. I have noticed that turtles have a bad habit of facing away from the trail.

Back end of a diamondback turtle

Jane got a picture of a Gulf fritillary.

Gulf fritillary

Have you ever seen such a flock of nondescript birds? Not only are they almost uniformly light gray, but they have their bills tucked in. Are the small ones at the left babies or a smaller species of nondescript birds? Bah. More cormorants in the back.

Possibly the most nondescript birds I have ever seen in front of the omnipresent cormorants. Plovers?

We stopped for a sandwich at the Santiva General Store, which was ever more evidence that there is no fast food in the South. We drove around Captiva after that, admiring the homes we’ll never own.

Jane had signed us up for a talk on nature photography at the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife (CROW). The Clinic is funded entirely by donations and has a budget of $40,000 per week. The speaker was an amateur photographer, although a better term might be “non-professional.” She certainly had a lot of experience. After the talk we had an opportunity to photograph some of CROW’s “ambassadors.” They try to release every animal they can, but If a hawk or owl has to have a wing amputated, well. I was hoping that one of the ambassadors would be a burrowing owl, but no such luck. 

Rescued red-tailed hawk

Great horned owl

In addition to the red-tailed hawk and great horned owl, they had a snake available for pictures. Not sure what could happen to a snake to make it unable to survive in the wild. We can rule out amputations. I didn’t take a picture of the snake. I don’t like snakes.

After a fun and educational day, we got in line on the road going off the island and went back home.