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 Real FloridaCracker!

Sometimes you just know you're going to get along with someone. Reading a person's blog for years turns out to be a surprisingly good way to take their measure.  I don't remember how I got onto FloridaCracker's blog, Pure Florida, but the "crack" part definitely applied--I was hooked from the get-go.

The man can really write, and he's got a wonderful sense of humor, and he knows pretty  much everything there is to know about Florida natural history. He cooks, too, and posts these hugely salivataceous photos of his culinary adventures. He fixes things. He has a lucky wife known as Mrs. FC, who stays off-camera. He has chickens and teenagers, too.  He has a ridiculously cute black Lab named Bear whom he videotapes doing ridiculously cute, doofy Lab stuff. Here's his tribute to Bear, whom he manages to conjure perfectly without a single photo of the dog. Anyone who goes through pet withdrawal upon being separated from their particular animal familiar will love this post as I do.

In his spare time, he teaches high school biology. For that, I give him five stars. Imagine having FloridaCracker as your high school biology teacher. Mrs. Corbin, you were great, but whoo-ee.

This may surprise FC, but one of the things I admire most about him is his ability to raise a pig for food and blog about said pig (without naming it, of course). And have it still turn out to be food, and not some kind of porcine cybercelebrity whom he has to keep until it is the size of a boxcar because all his readers have gotten attached to it. Anyone who has ever blogged about so much as a spider in the corner of the studio knows that once you name something, the blogosphere wants to know how "Corky," or whatever you  named the spider, is doing these days. So blogging a food pig is dicey territory, but FloridaCracker pulls it off. That, my friends, is something.

He also coins words that completely delight me. I try, in my ham-handed way, to emulate him, but fail miserababbleaciously. 

He freely breaks the cyberspatial rules. I was told by no less an authority than Corey Finger of 10,000 Birds, a blog that gets something like, oh, 72 gazillion hits a day, that if you, as a craven hit-thirsty blogger, want to have search engines pick up on your posts, you have to use really spare, to-the-point post titles and tags. So, for instance, if FloridaCracker were going to talk about transplanting a palm tree, he might use the post title, 

"Transplanting a Palm Tree."

Instead, his post is titled, 

"Moving A Small Palm Tree While Wearing a GoPro Camera On Your Head."

And then, needless to say, he puts a small camera on his head and it faithfully records his increasingly desperate groans and grunts as he lives the reality of lifting a hundred-pound rootball out of a deep hole. Who else would think to do this? I do not know.

His tag for such a post may well include 

The Boy Ain't Right

A recent post, "Gopher a Little Closer" , is about the endangered gopher tortoises (maybe a dozen) that inhabit his little piece of the Real Florida. There is an absolutely charming video of a gopher tortoise waiting suspiciously, then scurrying at warp speed into its burrow, or trying to. And FC finds a root that keeps the tortoise from entering smoothly, and he makes a little mental note to come out and cut that root. And then he leaves a bunch of nice romaine lettuce at the burrow mouth as a little present for the tortoise, who's already lucky as heck to be living in the backyard of such a sentient and caring being. He burns off the scrub to encourage the open habitat and the tender forbs the tortoises need for food. Anybody who can burn within a mile of their house without setting it on far has my undying respect. 

His JEEP looks like it just rolled off the showroom floor. Having never seen a clean Jeep before, I stared. Here, he's peeling a bit of plastic off the brand new windshield. Why a new windshield? Because a  vulture slammed into it a few weeks back, making it into this:

photo by FloridaCracker

Heavily ironic, because he'd just posted about planning his day around taking a sick black vulture to a veterinarian, which turned into a huge wild veterinarian chase. His post, "Riding in Cars With Vultures"

paints a portrait of a boy who ain't right, in the nicest possible way.

All right. My intent here was not to thoroughly embarrass FloridaCracker, which I have doubtless achieved, but merely to point up the front-loaded coolness with which he lives that made me completely geek out at the prospect of meeting him.

photo by Bill Webb

I mean, look at me. I'm all a-hyuck a-hyuck.

And then it got worse, because then I was flanked by FloridaCracker and CrackerBoy, whose unique take on the world as a socially evolved deep thinker and ex-cop I appreciate tremendously, and they made a big sloppy geek sandwich of me. Plotzing at the Enchanted Forest. Hooty hoot!

Like I said, sometimes you just know. I'm mighty glad to have met Bill and Michele Webb and FloridaCracker. This living through electrons is all well and good, but there's really no substitute for the brick-and-mortar version. 

photo by Bill Webb

To read FloridaCracker's take on the whole thing, visit his retelling here.

The Enchanted Forest

One of the official activities for Liam and me at the Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival was to help the hugely capable and entertaining naturalist Joe Swingle lead a walk centered around gopher tortoises at the Enchanted Forest Sanctuary near Titusville, Florida. Now, what I know about gopher tortoises you could put in an overturned thimble, but Joe took care of all that. Besides, the tortoises were all snoozin' in their digs, because it had been so cold.  I was just along to help people see some stuff they might not have noticed, and Liam was toting Joe's gear and generally adding to the personability of the event. Phoebe came along, too! and so, to our delight, did Bill Webb.

About the first thing I noticed was some really scuzzy looking sabal palm fronds, and I wondered what might have scraped all the chlorophyll bearing layers off of them. So I turned the frond over and found an amazing network of frass and then tiny silken cocoons which I was too excited to photograph, wanting instead just to show it to the kids on the trip. Kids tend to get much more excited about natural history stuff than do most adults. No wonder I get along well with kids.

photo by Floridacracker

See that nasty pale area near the rachis? Well, the cocoons and frass networks were under the leaf.

So in Chimp CSI mode I dig around and carefully opened one of the silken cocoons, a process which fascinated the kids, and found this little culprit

which I could tell was going to eclose into a very small but long-winged moth. Which species, as yet unknown, but butterflies make chrysalis capsules, not silken cocoons, so we knew it was a moth. Cool!

Photo by Machele White from bugguide.net

When I got home I Googled it and found our pupa to be a palm leaf skeletonizer, Homaledra sabalella.  Which is a pretty cool name for a tiny, unsurprisingly brown moth. I dunno. I just liked the idea that there was a moth whose caterpillars were out scrapin' sabal palms for all they were worth.

We did some other things like percolation tests which we all enjoyed, seeing visible evidence that organic matter in soils (leaves, sticks and the like) greatly slows percolation in Florida's sand.

Bill Webb's photo of me and Liam, which he titled Science Chimp and Cub.

There was mistletoe in the oaks

growing in green balls in the leafless trees, reminding me of seeing the old black men with their car trunks full of mistletoe they'd shot out of the oaks in Tidewater Virginia, selling it on the old highway to Williamsburg, when I was a kid. 

Looking down, there was Innocence, Houstonia procumbens   (Rubiaceae), which reminds me of its close cousin Honesty, or roundleaf bluet (Houstonia coerulea). Only in albino midget form. I also like the idea of plants with just one name. Innocence. Honesty. Chastity. Cher. 

Moving along the trail, we found fresh bobcat pugmarks, which about made my eyes roll back in my head. Bobcats are not nearly the huge deal in Florida that they are in Ohio. Oh gosh I love bobcats. I love the idea of bobcats. I have seen three wild bobcats in my life (first in Texas; second in North Dakota, and third about this time last year, 8  miles from our house!) So I could die now and still be happy.  Here's my hand for scale. That's a big ol' pussycat.

And even better, a fresh bobcat log!

At this point I'm down on hands and knees trying to figure out how the earth got piled up near this turd with no visible scratch marks from the cat. Derr....I'm mumbling to myself when a voice comes from behind me, surmising that this is the sign of dung beetles working from below. Oh, now, I'm loving that, because we are short on dung beetles in Ohio. Lots of dung, not many dung beetles. Gotta do something about that.

And the voice belonged to...

Floridacracker! (pictured here with his candy-apple red, nattily spotless JEEP, a vehicular extension of his personality if I have ever seen one)

who made the trip over to the festival to meet me and the kids!

I am not sure I will be able to adequately convey how much it meant to me to meet this man at last, having enjoyed his creative output for years via his blog, Pure Florida.

In  my next post, I will try.