Florida, Days 5 and 6

 Tuesday, February 8

We woke up to fog and clouds. Rain was in the forecast. I suggested we hang around the condo and take a day of rest. Corkscrew is a long walk for women “of a certain age.”

Our morning was not without excitement. Dolphin spotting is easy on Fort Myers Beach. It’s just like finding the bison at Yellowstone—look for groups of people staring at something.

How to spot a dolphin--look for people staring at the ocean

I got a good picture with most of the front half of its back out of the water.

A good breach shot

This dolphin was behaving oddly. It swam in circles and darted toward the shore with big splashes.

Circling and splashing

As we watched, we decided that it was, in fact, two dolphins, a mother and a baby. They stubbornly refused to breach at the same time, and I took about a million photos until I got one in which you can just barely see the baby’s fin above and to the right of the mom’s fin.

Barely visible evidence of two dolphins together

Here’s one last swoosh before they disappeared.

The last swoosh

An osprey sat in a tree and watched the whole display.

An osprey bystander

We passed the rest of the day catching up on various things. I am in the midst of a Creative Writing class and had homework to do. I also went through the vast number of photos I had taken so far on vacation, deleted the duds, made a backup, and cleared the photo card. Nothing worse than seeing some awesome wildlife moment and finding no memory left in the camera.

Wednesday, February 9

Nice weather returned. We went to a place I had not been before, Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve, right in Fort Myers. Like Corkscrew, this was a boardwalk through, as the name suggests, a cypress swamp. In spite of the highway noise, Six Mile Cypress seemed tranquil and isolated.

Reflections in tranquil waters

Our first wildlife sighting was an alligator on an artificial island in the middle of a large pond.

Alligator on a raft

Most of the water was sheltered and dead calm. I loved the reflections of the weirdly-shaped cypress knees. I had always heard that the cypress knees stick up out of the water to provide air to the roots, an adaptation to low oxygen levels. A sign here said that it helped anchor the trees in the soft, water-saturated soil. Maybe both? When I was a child, my dad had a cypress knee. I don’t remember now where he got it or why. I also don’t know what became of it. Who knows? I may still find it in the garage.

Cypress knees

More cypress knees

Some of the cypress trees were old and gnarly. This one has created its own little island.

An old cypress that has built an islant

This tree had cute baby ferns growing all the way up its trunk and all over its branches.

A tree covered with little ferns

We may have seen more bird diversity here than we did at Corkscrew. There were ibises, that I didn’t bother photographing. We saw a black-crowned night heron in the shrubs at the edge of a pond.

Black-crowned night heron

A great blue heron was standing in a tree.

Great blue heron in a tree

Later we realized that it was actually on a nest.

Great blue heron on its nest

We saw the rare headless black and white warbler. (I’ve said it before, but it bear repeating—photographing birds is very annoying.)

Black and white warbler, headless

There was a tricolored heron,

Tricolored heron

An anhinga,

Anhinga

And another alligator, this sharing the log with two red-bellied sliders (we think of them as turtles, but they are really terrapins. True turtles live in salt water.)

Alligator and two terrapins

Nine more terrapins were behind the alligator.

Alligator's tail, left, and 9 more terrapins

I saw larger fish than I had seen anywhere else.

Relatively large fish

Farther along the boardwalk, we got quite close to more red-bellied sliders.

Close up of two red-bellied sliders

Like Corkscrew, we saw a hawk just before we left the preserve. This one was a short-tailed hawk.

Short-tailed hawk

We had planned to go to another park in Fort Myers, but we didn’t have time. We had to hustle back to the condo so I could Zoom into my class at 5:00.

I caught the last part of the sunset right after class ended. It was a beautiful day.

Sunset