Wild Florida

Some old friends who live in rural Florida had us out to stay for a week. It was so good to see them again and VERY good to escape from the sad, stressful and depressing stuff that has been going on here.  It's so restorative, too, in a cold, dank, dark English February, to suddenly be somewhere warm and bright and full of natural life.

I'll warn you now, I'm no wildlife photographer. It's hard for me to get any pictures of any wildlife at all. In fact,  I hardly even SEE wildlife when I'm walking along in England, let alone manage to photograph it.  So I don't have fancy camera equipment or one of those long lenses. But even with my little pocket snapshooter I got some shots of Florida's wildlife. So much of it is so big that you'd have to be blind not to spot it.

So here are a pair of sandhill cranes, above....

And below, I managed to get a shot of a roseate spoonbill before it flapped away.

And, of course, there are gators galore.... most of them hastily leaped into the water as we approached but these ones decided to stay put in the sunshine and keep an eye on us.   We stopped about 30 feet away but they didn't move - just kept looking.

Later, when we canoed down the river, a big gator followed us along, but luckily we didn't know till after we got back to shore.  I had been more concerned that little A might fall out of the canoe, but if I'd realised there was an alligator following us I'd probably have fallen out of the canoe in fright myself.

 I'm no canoeist either, so I didn't take many photos while we were going along, but I did want to take a row of turtles sitting on a log, as they love to do.  They made such a lovely picture.  But - too late!  By the time I'd got my camera out, they'd taken fright.

 If you look close at the log there below, though, you might just spot the last turtle preparing to jump off that log to hide beneath the water lilies.

Last time I saw turtles in Florida, I was able to watch one laying her eggs in the sand. Fascinating.

Little A was impressed by the wild manatee. These are huge endangered mammals that live in Florida and they grow up to thirteen feet long. In the winter they often congregate.in warmer places and you can spot them easily - this shot was taken in Blue Spring State Park.

And I believe these fish below are long nosed gar, two or three feet long, I estimated (below) although there were so many huge fish swimming around that I lost track of what they all were.



I regretted not taking a better camera - or at least a polarizing filter to cut out reflections - when I watched some tilapia making their circular nests in the shallow water. Tilapia are an invasive species in Florida, but it was still fascinating to watch them swimming around the bit of river bed they had prepared, gathering up any stones and debris in their mouths and dumping it outside the circle so that the nest is perfect.

All of Central Florida was a pretty wild place till the 1970s, when D*SNEY came along....

I was amazed at how Orlando has spread and developed even in the ten years or so since I was last there, and I was very glad I didn't have to find my own way through it.

As I looked at the sprawl I found it hard to believe that it was totally rural well within living memory; I've spoken to people who remember the cattle market at then-sleepy little Kissimmee!. Although Florida has been a tourist destination for over a century now, it's important to strike the right balance between people and nature, development and wilderness.

Well, now I need to get over the jet lag and research an article about Malta by the end of the week  I'll be catching up on blogs as I go, and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has been up to.