Pink Flamingos, Happy Boy

The first thing Liam and I did upon arriving at Merritt Island NWR near Titusville, FL, was to stop right on the road for a bald eagle who was hangin' out on a power pole. I have been there a bunch of times and I'd never seen that. Now, maybe I'm supposed to be blase about an enormous sea eagle 30' over my head. But I'm not. A truck honked at us and swerved, gunning its engine, and it was then I realized it was probably stupid of me to stop on the main road. But still. I was overwhelmed. And as it turned out, we never saw another eagle perched so close. I was glad we'd taken the time to ogle it. Liam took this photo! (I kept handing him my camera, as all the best wildlife was out the passenger side of the car. Wink, wink.)

Great big and itty bitty Florida cooters near the Merritt Island Visitor Center. I want to name a dog Cooter.

Another Liam shot of a majestic high-headed gator. Ahh. Such a grand reptile.

I love packing my long lens around. I can take candid shots of my primate companions. Liam saw some oranges hanging high overhead and wanted one sooo badly.

He scrounged a palm frond petiole and took to leaping and poking.

I so wanted him to score an orange to eat, but they were on there pretty good, wouldn't come down for him. I call my kids The Toucans. It is very difficult to keep them in fruit. I buy apples and kiwis and clementines by the bushel.

We climbed back in the car and drove slowly around Black Point Wildlife Drive. The light was hard and harsh, but we had fun fun fun.

I always forget that roseate spoonbills have head skin the color of used chewing gum. Freaky greenish-blue. That's a winter American avocet exiting, stage left.

We were in Florida for a week and saw oodles of spoonbills, but I never once got used to seeing a large flaming pink bird. I'm glad of that. May I never get used to spoonbills. 

I had a good (silent, inner) chuckle when a woman I was standing near on a viewing platform asked me if I'd seen the flamingo go over. 

"I saw a roseate spoonbill go over just a bit ago, but no flamingo."

"This was a flamingo."

I chewed that over for awhile and decided the fate of the world didn't ride on whether she'd seen a flamingo or not. Flamingos may sometimes be found very sparingly in the Florida Keys. A day's drive south of Titusville.

I replied simply, "Cool!" and ambled off. About twenty minutes later I was peering intently into a shrub at a common yellowthroat. The same woman came up behind me. "What are you looking at?" she asked.

"Common yellowthroat, male, right at the water's edge."

"Really? Now who'd ever think to stop and look at something like that?" she exclaimed.

That took me by surprise. Huh?? I actually laughed out loud. What a bizarre thing to say!

I turned around and smiled at her, meeting her eyes.

"That pink bird you saw fly over? Roseate spoonbill. Flamingos are found only in the Keys, and they're super rare."

"Oh! OK."

Never can pass up a teaching moment, and she'd given me permission to correct her (kindly) by asking me what I was looking at, and making a comment that told me she didn't yet know a hawk from a handsaw. Seemed like the right thing to do, to tell her she'd seen a spoonbill, so she wouldn't go around calling them flamingos to everybody she ran into. Kind of like wiping a daub of ketchup off somebody's lapel.

Or shoulder...I never tire of trying to get a peek or a picture of a spoonbill's saffron tail. Not to mention the used-bubblegum head.

Binocular vision in a young tricolored heron. I like his tighty whities.

Really, what a lovely bird, all painted with rufous. Saw so many of them and never tired of the "Lady of the Lake," either. Pure elegance on the wing or on foot. I do miss the name "Lousiana heron."

When I was a teen, I was pretty sure I'd never get to see a wood stork in my lifetime. They were almost extinct then. I felt the same about brown pelicans and bald eagles. Imagine. I'm that old. But I'm not that old. They've recovered that quickly! There is so much to celebrate in conservation today. Forget the gloom. There are bald eagles on the power poles, and wood storks walking around on lawns and roadside ditches. And that, to me, is a miracle.

 Liam liked this wood stork. He narrated its preening. I love birding with Liam.

A raft of northern pintails, hauled out. They have the right idea. Breed in the prairie potholes, winter along the Florida coast. I could dig that seasonal regime, if I had somebody to fly with.

Another Liam Thompson shot, of shovelers! Watch out world, he's got a telephoto!

He's not bad with an iPhone camera, either. Selfie by the pool... taken for his sister who was freezing her patootie off in a Maine snowstorm at that moment. He said it was so bright he couldn't see the palm tree until he got back in the room. Classic shot!

Yes, it's always worth yanking the kid out of school for a week in January. Never more emphatically so than this January. He told me today (Feb. 2) that he's finally caught up with schoolwork and back in the groove. And that the Florida vacation was worth every minute of grief since he got back.
Atta boy! Way to live.

Liam's First Alligator

I will not lie. Liam's first and main reason for wanting to go to Florida was not together time with his mom and sister, although he loves that. No, he wanted to see a ten-foot-long lizard. He really, really wanted to see an alligator. So from the moment we came in over the runway at Orlando airport, we were straining our orbs for eyebumps in every ditch and puddle. But it would be a couple of days before we got lucky.

Driving along Black Point Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island NWR, I finally spotted the prehistoric pile of scalage that said "gator" to my unaccustomed eye. It would have been hard to miss this one, hauled out as he was on a warm winter's day. Holy smokes!

It was all I could do to get Liam to take his eyes off it long enough to snap the photo of a boy with longing, for now, fulfilled.

We got out the spotting scope to get a better look at this dozing beauty.

I don't know why, but every time I see a dozing 'gator, my first thought is that it has hauled out of the water to die. They just look dead. When they close their eyes, the eye seems to sink back into the head, and they really, really look dead. You can't discern any respiration. A sleeping gator defines "inert."

Until the Science Chimp bleats like a little lost fawn separated from its mama and maybe about to try to cross the creek...oh, hello there. Sorry to bother you, but we didn't want our first gator viewing to turn into a wake.

Thus satisfied that the 'gator was quite alive and thinking about venison, we moved the scope so the kids and I could appreciate that armored tail. Dinosaurs live!

It was to be a wonderful evening for 'gators. We proceeded from Black Point to the alluringly named Biolab Road, where a molten sunset pointed up the scalation on three more beautiful gators.

It was really too beautiful and primeval to be believed. And these weren't babies, either. Liam's first  gator was the biggest--gettin' on 12 feet, we guessed. 

This one, maybe 9 feet...about the length of my canoe...eek! I wondered what it would be like to canoe around a beast like that. Maybe FloridaCracker can tell us. Does your heart race when one swirls under you? Heck, a big carp can scare the granola out of me, rocking my boat...what about a gator longer than your own conveyance??

I couldn't resist a shot of Firehair admiring this gorgeous animal.

Another...maybe 7 feet.

Another conservation success story. It's hard to believe we almost hunted the American alligator into extinction, just for the bumpy "leather" it lent to fancy purses and cowboy boots. It seems so archaic, so ridiculous to exterminate such a magnificent beast for things like that. It seems so...human of us. I grew up thinking I'd never see an alligator, or a bald eagle, or a wood stork...they were all but gone in the mid-1960's.

Endangered species legislation works. Alligators, bald eagles, and wood storks are back. Brown pelicans, too--they were once on the brink of extinction, as amazing as that seems. It's just too bad that so many truly endangered species are languishing in the Endangered Species Waiting Lounge, left unprotected because it's economically inconvenient to list them.

 How could we keep taking the tops off Appalachian mountains if the cerulean warbler that lives on them were finally listed as an endangered species, and we were legally bound to protect its habitat? Better not list that one. See, that's how it works. Once we saw what a powerful conservation tool the ESA could be, it was imperative to remove its teeth.

What if we had to legally acknowledge that polar bears and Pacific walruses are endangered because their pack ice habitat is melting out from under them? Legally they're listed as threatened, so we're not bound to do anything to reverse this deeply alarming phenomenon. They're in the waiting room, too. And what about the seals, mainstay of polar bears, that need the pack ice for pupping? Do we expect them and the walruses to simply switch overnight to hauling out on land? Who needs a bunch of pack ice? We don't. So what if they do? 

Having gotten a bit off track, I am thankful for alligators and the legislation that allowed their populations to recover. Well over a million alligators now populate the ditches and swamps of the Southeast.  And I'm deeply thankful that there are still places where you can take your kids to see the oversized scaly wonders of the natural world. 

See it while it's here, folks.