Fun on Biolab Road

A young roseate spoonbill greeted us as we turned onto Biolab Road.  What an alluring name for a road!

                                This is what a black vulture does when it's really, really windy.

I like how he's using his tail as a brake, and he's clinging for all he's worth to the snag. Vulture feet are not strong in the clutching department, which is why they have to carry prey in their beaks.

Black vultures are a Florida fixture, and they call southwest Ohio their year-round home, but they're still pretty unusual to see in southeast Ohio, where we live. I have a feeling it's only a matter of time before they completely colonize my area. We have roadkill aplenty. You could live on roadkill around here, if you wanted to. Which I do not.

Bill had told me that Biolab Road was a must-see, and we were not disappointed. Phoebe said it led to the beach, and that seemed like a meet adventure for a mom and two cubs...drive down the road and wind up on Cape Canaveral's beach. We drove and drove, rolling slowly along, taking in the incredible wildlife along the way.

The kids loved the reddish egret, especially when I told them that birders call it the "drunken clown" for the way it staggers about in the shallows, following the lightning-fast movement of schools of fish which only it can see.

It throws out its wings for balance, making a spectacle of itself. To someone who doesn't know that it's fishing, it looks crazy, possessed, drunk.

And then it plunges its rapier bill straight down into the water to stab at little fishies.

 A far more placid feeding style distinguishes the roseate spoonbill. I felt incredibly lucky to be able to show this bird to my babies.

The spoonbills are more filter feeders, running that great appendage through the silt and snapping closed on whatever lives within.

They swing their great heads side to side, slowly sweeping through the shallows. 

They make pass after pass in an unconsciously lovely ballet.

Earlier in the day, we'd lucked upon a preening group of spoonbills along Black Point Wildlife Drive in Merritt Island NWR.  I quickly deployed the Leica scope and camera to digiscope their sickly green heads, ruby eyes and glorious crimson shoulders.

Could there be a much more convincing link between the dinosaurs and today's birds?

It was not much of a stretch to imagine duck-billed dinosaurs snapping to attention at the approach of a pack of Deinonychus, especially for Liam.

So long did we watch and admire the wading birds and snoozing gators that it finally became clear that we would never reach the beach before dark

and we decided that that was fine with us, because what could be better than this pastel sunset, with us all breathing the salt air, appreciating the heartbreakingly beautiful color. Color has been gone from our lives for months and months. We decided that all our color had drained down into Florida. We're very anxious to get it back, as rainy day follows rainy day and the crocuses struggle to bloom.

Phoebe snapped me in pursuit of egrets

and I snapped her in pursuit of sunsets

and it was all dreamily beautiful. We hated to see that sun sink, but it was kind enough to go behind some cutout palm trees, delighting Liam who thought it was time for the pterodactyl to swoop through, cackling, at any moment.

A snowy egret punched a white hole in the inky marsh as we said goodbye to another Florida day.

All landscape and car interior photos taken with  my Canon G-12, chunky little point and shoot genius box.

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.