Escape to Blue Spring

I'm writing this on a dreary Ohio evening. I've just returned from a four-mile run and a singing session in the Waxler Church at twilight. It's the most I can do to fight the gloom. The boys are at a StupidBowl party, something that is frankly so far down on my scale of Appealing Things that it's flatlining. I'm wondering if I can conjure a little of the magic of the day Liam and I threw our suitcases and backpacks in the car, wound down through the hamlet of Bonn, Ohio, where we spotted a cat verrrry high up in a tree. I think this is one of those situations where it's a lot easier to run up than to ooch your way down...yiiiikes! I do not envy that kitty. But trust it got back down...they usually do.

 We fought our way through a sudden snowstorm to Canton/Akron airport 

sat on a Southwest jet for 2.5 hours, rented a car in Orlando, and headed to Blue Springs State Park for the final 45 minutes of the day before night fell.

I'm glad I didn't look at the map before embarking on our journey, because in no way is Blue Springs on the way to Titusville, as I had imagined. All I knew is I wanted to show my boy some manatees.

In that, we were not disappointed.

Consider the contrast between the monochrome, frigid world we inhabit, and the limpid, 72-degree turquoise green waters of Blue Spring. We certainly did. 

Liam shrugged into shorts and I rolled up my pants and peeled off layers of shirtage

and we walked with bare arms! in the evening warmth.

Gazing into the water, we watched the manatees gently lolling, rising every so often to exhale, phaaaaaa! and inhale.... thwipp!

and it all had such a surreal quality that we couldn't stop sighing along with the enormous placid sirenians.

I set about trying to get photos of their nostrils and eyes because let's face it, the rest of the manatee is but a vast and beautiful expanse of gentle blubber, ending in paddles

I squealed when I got this shot because it shows the nostrils slamming shut.

Let's have a closer look.

and that my dears is about all the spout you're going to get out of a manatee. I wish I could have gotten a better photo of the eye, because the eyelids close more like a sphincter than lids. Hard to describe, but the eye looks like it's at the center of a many-petaled flower or a star. It's beautiful.

before she sounds in the four-foot depths of this warm spring. The manatees are here for the geothermal upwelling which warms the water to a constant 72 degrees year round.

The fish like it, too.

Most prominent: the invasive exotic blue tilapia, Oreochromis aureus, native to Israel and escaped from fish farms and distributed throughout the Deep South and Central America now. I hadn't known the tilapia was a member of the cichlid family (the darlings of aquariists). I have eaten my share of them, especially in Central America. Pretty good eating, but a bit mucky-tasting to my palate. 

A common snook, Centropomis undecimalis. A native predatory fish, prized as a gamefish. It did look a bit lurky there. 

Longnose gar, Lepisosteus osseus. Gar are super cool looking fish, also predaceous and well-armed with snaggly teeth.

I stared at this one for a long time, and couldn't make it out to be anything but a pacu, which I recognized from my hours of staring into aquariums. Pacus are large tetras (charachins) native to South America. (Piranhas are also charachins.) I understand that in Papua New Guinea, these hefty fish have been known to rise up and neatly remove the testicles of skinny-dippers. One would presume that, in these fruit and nut-eating fish, this is a case of mistaken identity. Or a semantic error.

That has got to be terrible. Fatal, even. Eeesh! Wear your swim trunks!

Speaking of dangerous, we found this gentleman moored to the shore, trying to look like a sodden log.

Our first gator of the trip, a nice big'un. We would see many more, since the weather would be near perfect the whole week. Ahhhh thank you Florida. I understand it was craptastic the two weeks before our visit. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Like when you catch a manatee yawning, or something. No. It couldn't be yawning underwater. 

Maybe it's laughing. Yeah, that's it. Making pacu jokes. Get a load of those papillae. I have been honored to be mawed by young captive manatees in Brasil, and I can tell you that the suction power of that velvety mouth is awesome.  I tried to stay in front of the molars...which reminds me...is manatee on my Bite List? 

I felt very lucky not only to see manatee lips, but to finally be SLEEVELESS, and best of all to have a traveling companion for the week like Liam. Someone who can dig the scene with me, who makes me laugh. I'm grateful that his school doesn't object when we occasionally yank him out for travel and enrichment. Better than throwing a pinata to the elephants. They know he's going to learn a ton of things Ohio can't teach him. Like about pacus. He just ran out of the studio, doubled over. Keep 'em thinking, my dad always said.

Far too soon, the sun sank on Blue Spring, and we turned toward dinner and Titusville.

We heard cricket music, the sweet exhalations of manatees in the gathering dark. And we were so glad to be in Florida. On the way into Titusville, we stopped to find Comet Lovejoy in the inky sky. I found it in a matter of seconds, having learned where it was back home, shivering in the cold. We got back in the car and hadn't gone 100 yards down the road when a huuuge orange fireball exploded into the sky. I'd never seen anything like it. I thought I'd seen my first UFO.  We finally realized that they must've launched a rocket from Canaveral. Atlas 5, with a Navy communications satellite on baord. And we were in the perfect place to observe the launch. Our trip was starting most auspiciously.

Manatees, Breathing

It was absolutely hypnotic, standing on the dock at Blue Springs, watching the manatees loll in the 72 degree waters. 

They aren't there because they're on vacation. They're in the warm springs because they'd die if they were anywhere else. I was very surprised to learn that prolonged exposure to water below 60 degrees will kill a manatee. They seem sort of blubbery; they seem like they'd be well-insulated, but no...they're delicate tropical beasties and they have to be warm.  Wintry temperatures (it went down to the 20's a lot in much of Florida this winter!) send them packing to power plant outflows and natural warm springs. Warm springs are why only Florida boasts wild manatees, and only Florida will  ever have them. Another reason to love Florida. She gives us so many gifts. Gators. Flamingoes. Manatees.

They'd come up for air with a tremendous whoosh, a sonorous inhalation, then submerge again, shutting their little nostril valves tight.

It was beautiful, standing there in the fog, listening to manatees breathing.

I tear up just thinking about it.

Ghostly tableaux one after another as the fog veiled through...sfffff whoooooof!

A lazy flipper or paddle-like tail would occasionally break the surface. I had to remind myself that these Schmoo-like creatures had bones.

Moving farther upstream, we came upon a mother and her calf. They were mouthing a rock, for what I couldn't divine. A nummy algal coating?

 The whole scene was magic, these big sweet beasts lolling around, placidly sucking on a rock, the palms catching the morning sun.

It was all I could do not to wade in with them, but they don't need more human contact. These are wild animals, and what humans mostly give them, aside from some lettuce and cabbage to eat and an occasional drink from a hose, is horrid white slashing propeller scars on their slow backs. More manatees die from boat collisions than any other single cause. The people who race through manatee zones are the same kind who shoot whooping cranes on purpose...society's filler, the soulless stratum, packing peanuts for brains.

 Manatees remind me of box turtles--just too slow for our inane and selfish pace. Somehow, they hang on.

This mother and child, as yet unmarked by scars. The older ones almost all have them.

All the while, the gentle whoosh of their breath breaking the stillness.

We could have stayed there all day with them, but our flight called and too soon we had to turn for home. You all know how I love Ohio, but I must confess she didn't show her best face as a biting 20-degree wind tore at our light tropical clothing at the Akron airport. Arrrgggh. Scrape the car free, get the heater blowing. Back to reality with a dash of ice in the face.

The whole trip floats like a dream in my head. I'll never look at Florida the way I did before I saw the Real Florida on this adventure. I'd made several trips to the Fort Meyers area, and I have to confess I was shellshocked by the crushing scale of development there. I never could have imagined living in Florida, with my pre-conceived notions of what it represented. And now, having experienced her wild places and met Floridians who love her passionately, even exploited and in some places ruined as she is, I understand. There is still a LOT of the Real Florida left, and Real Floridians are unstinting in their efforts to protect it.

 We are so lucky as a nation to have this funny footlike projection where, by dint of its subtropical climate, so much natural magic happens. Go. Just go. The Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in late January is an excellent place to start exploring and, if necessary, renovating your feelings about FloridaCracker's "sweet, fragile Florida." For the most fun homework ever, get yourself reading his blog, Pure Florida. You'll thank me!

photo by Cap'n Denny

Don't worry. He let the redfish go. Well, this particular one. A guy's gotta eat.

The Curious Manatee

We're at Blue Springs State Park not far from Orlando, Florida, watching gators and manatees lie down and laze together in the heated water. It was all I could do not to wade in and get me some manatee love, but that's frowned upon. I did enjoy watching the Plecostomus catfish giving the manatees algae-suckin' rubdowns with their big sucker mouths, something the manatees appeared to be electing to invite by swimming down into the big concentrations of fish. The catfish obligingly worked them over, cleaned them up, just like my old Pleco used to clean up the aquarium walls.

A juvenile manatee swam in from stage right, wearing a belt at the base of his tail. Attached to the belt was a buoy with a radiotransmitter on it. One of the regulars on the observation dock said that this was an injured animal that had been rehabilitated at Sea World, and released with tracking, so they could see how he did. Cool!

We weren't the only ones who noticed the float. A much smaller juvenile manatee swam over and began fooling around with the float. First, she (I didn't know the animal's sex, but it just seemed like a girl thing to do) gathered it in her flippers. She held it underwater and released it, to see how it bobbed right back up.

Boing! She did this a number of times.

It was time for further exploration. She began to mouth the float.

The kids and I laughed to see her mess with it. Meanwhile the tagged manatee lay sullenly on the spring bottom, probably wishing someone would relieve him of this annoyingly fascinating appendage.

It wasn't long before the baby manatee got the whole darn float in her mouth. We wondered if the biologists who attached the transmitter knew it was going to be chewed upon by manatees.

When the baby tired of playing with the float, she went and got her momma, who repeated the entire exercise, even down to practically swallerin' the thing.

I apologize for the low quality of these photos. It was foggy, and the animals were very far away and underwater at that. But I was pleased to capture a little of the manatee way of doing things with the 300 mm. Canon telephoto zoom lens. 

Lots of people love manatees. Curious, gentle, sweet...those are the adjectives you hear over and over when people try to describe the sirenian personality.

I'm glad we've not exploited our native manatees for marine shows. It  probably has more to do with a manatee's decidedly non-flashy, rather blimplike appearance and way of moving than any sort of ethics on our part.

As the white propeller scars on these animals attest, they come into more than enough contact with us and our doings as it is. I'm thankful for preserves like Blue Springs, where these sweet dirigibles can come to spend the winter, warm and relatively undisturbed. And we can come to tell them we love them.

And the people gathered on the observation dock did love them. You could feel it, and I'm sure the manatees could, too.

Blue Springs Manatees

High on our agenda for our Florida trip was a visit to Blue Springs, a bit west of Orlando.  This is a classic limestone (karst) spring, carved out by upwellings of sweet water.  We devoted our last morning to it, as a sweet cherry atop the luscious sundae Sunday of our trip. It was cold and foggy when we arrived, making us envy the manatees stacked like cordwood in the pellucid 72 degree water of the river.  My first wild manatees, anywhere. Yes, I'd seen the Amazonian freshwater manatee in Brazil and Guyana, but only in captive situations. Heck, I'd gotten right down and hugged them!

I was overwhelmed by seeing free-living wild manatees--so very many--I counted 80 in one turn of my head! Yeah, yeah, I was bawling. I'd waited a long time to see my first wild sirenians, and I'd strained my eyes peering into the muddy waters of many a tropical river trying. This was too easy. It was like they were waiting for a bus, and the bus was us!

While we waited for the fog to clear, we looked beneath the observation dock. Some native Florida gar joined a snook, hanging as if on strings in the water. My GarGuru, FloridaCracker, advises that there may be two species of gar here, so he advised me to go against my Science Chimp instincts and not get too specific. 

The spring was almost choked with tilapia, an African escapee from fish farms. They're cichlids, related to those darlings of freshwater aquaria. Pretty good eating, but it doesn't look like we're going to catch up with their reproductive rate any time soon. Sigh. Fortunately (or unfortunately for Blue Springs), tilapia are confined to waters that stay above 60 degrees year-round, meaning that (so far) only Florida has to deal with them, and, outside of extreme southern Florida, generally around power plant outflows.

Farm-raised tilapia fed on corn may be fattier than bacon or hamburger. (Remember when everyone found out that the fish sandwich at Mickey D's is the worst thing you can order? That was because of the way they fry it, though.) And,

 interestingly enough, commercially farmed tilapia are subjected to testosterone baths as young fry, turning them all into males. In this way, pisciculturists can ensure they raise an even-age batch of harvest-sized fish, rather than having to sort the offspring of their inevitable pairings. These look pretty even-aged to me--where are the juveniles? Dunno.

FloridaCracker says tilapia make huge, meter-wide bowl-shaped nests, crowding out native sunfishes. Bah. Why do so many escaped exotics have to live so darn large?

Tilapia have made it to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's 100 World's Worst Alien Invasive Species, having been introduced into tropical waters all over the planet.  They're the big boxy gray fish in this photo.

The blackish banjo-shaped catfish are vermiculated sailfin catfish, native to Amazonia and known in the aquarium trade as Plecostomus catfish, or "plecos." One guess where those came from. I'll give you a hint. When I was a kid, I had one in my tiny 5 gallon aquarium along with the mollies and platies, and it got about 8" long so we gave it to the neighbors, who flushed it down their toilet when it got too big for their 20-gallon tank. Never give anything to your neighbors if you care about it.

In an Amazonian fish market in Manaus, Brazil, I saw Plecostomus catfish for sale, stacked like firewood, upside down, their sucker mouths gasping for air. They were about a yard long. I felt bad about that for years until I saw these.

Why do we import things like this, to put in little tanks and then, when they no longer fit in the tanks, to put in our crystal springs, where they dig the sides out and erode them, making their nests? Why do people keep Burmese pythons and then, when they're too big for the  apartment,  turn them loose in the Everglades, to proliferate to terrifying levels? That's just what we do. Dumb stuff like that. Genies get out of bottles and there is no stuffing them back. Especially when the genies like Florida's subtropical climate.

There were other creatures in with the manatees, which caused the big sirenians no concern whatsoever.

This was the youngest gator we saw, still carrying its banded tail.

It was about two feet long.

Even the big gator seemed not to carry a threat to the gentle mammals, who cruised right under it.

Blue Springs State Park is a magical place. Just the original homestead with the new sun beaming through its Tillandsia-draped tree...oh my goodness. We didn't have time for the house tour. Well, anyway, the Science Chimp can rarely be found on historic house tours--she's usually digging around in the leaf litter instead.

We had only one morning, this misty morning burning off to bright sun, before we had to go back to freezing, iron-gray Ohio.

We soaked it up as best we could.  More manatees anon!