July 7, 2007 - Lovers Key

Hey!  It's 07-07-07 for a date today.  Bet the casinos are full of hopeful people, thinking that 7 is somehow a luckier number than say, 4.  Ah, if wishes were horses, poor men would ride.

These pictures are of a Roseate Spoonbill.  Barb was going out to the beach to reduce the shell population out there and happened to see this bird feeding near the mudflats, and snapped a few (like maybe 20 or 30) shots hoping some would come out.  Gee, you think?  These are among some of the best she's taken of that pink bird with the funny mouth.  In that last picture, the poor bird was going nuts, trying to grab as many of those little fish as it could.

These are a few pictures from our roof.  I'll explain why we were up there in a moment.  The first picture is of the shop area, including the new building for parking vehicles and storing bulky items like tractors.  Where it's standing, the park used to have a lean-to type shed that hurricane Wilma removed.

In the second picture is our little cargo trailer with the things we used to have stored in Federal Way, WA.  If you look carefully at the roof, up toward the front of the trailer on the left side, you can see the little solar panel I installed.  It runs a 3" muffin fan, providing a positive air flow through the trailer on days the sun is shining.  You'll notice near the rear of the trailer on the side that there's a vent.  When moving down the road, this lower vent would be the exhaust, with the intake up on the upper left side where I have that fan.  Behind the trailer you can see five shiny new traps the park bought and four rusty well worn traps.  They're box traps, and Barb and I get to set them in the evening and pick them up in the early mornings.  We do this four days a week.  The target animals are the feral cats (domestic cats that people have dropped off and are now running wild) and raccoons.  Both animals are real hard on the eggs of the shore birds, the baby birds themselves, and the turtle eggs and hatchlings.  At one time before the trapping was started, the raccoon population was so out of control that the animals would challenge people on the beach and in the picnic areas for their food.  The animals normally hunt at night, or at least dawn and dusk, but they'd be hunting during the day as well because the population had increased so much.  I've been told that now that we're trapping on a fairly regular basis, that none of the ten turtle nests we currently have on the beaches have been disturbed by the animals.  Good news for the turtles!  And we've not heard of any shorebird nests being robbed either.  There are still plenty of raccoons in the park, and we see them almost daily when we're out in the evenings.  We'll occasionally trap a opossum as well, and those poor animals are so odd that when I prop the door of the trap open for them to leave, they just curl back up and continue their nap.  Once I left a trap open (it was in our yard) for several hours and the opossum was still in it!  Had to turn the hose on it to get it to run back into the brush.  It happened to have a tracking tag in its ear, and I caught the same animal three times in the space of two weeks.  Not the brightest animals God made, that's for sure.

Pretty nice view of the water from up here, eh?  That canal leads into Estero Bay which is connected to the Gulf of Mexico, so given the desire and equipment, we could go to Cancun from right here!

And that's why we're up here.  Our air-conditioning system had a four-button controller, and the buttons had gone south (didn't work anymore).  I had to keep pounding them to get things to change.  The "fix" for that situation was to change the controller to the newer five-button system which means the circuit boards on each A/C unit had to be changed as well.  The shop wanted four hours labor (at $109 per hour) to do the job for us.  You can see our response to that one!  Took us less than four hours, and that included a run to Radio Shack, and we didn't know what we were doing!  And, of course, everything works great now.

Alright.  You've heard us talk about turtle patrols, turtle crawls, turtle false crawls, and turtle nests.  And now we're going to let you see what it actually looks like when she comes up on the beach and does her thing.

We were working on the Black Island Nature trail (pictures in a moment) and we got a call from Matt, the Assistant Manager of the park.  Seems a turtle (Loggerhead) had decided that now was the time to lay her eggs, and the fact that it was almost noon rather than almost midnight made no difference to her at all.  She'd come within 5 feet of some visitors who were sunbathing and they called the ranger station.  Pretty soon very little work was going on as we all gawked at the highly unusual daytime nest building process.  An average adult loggerhead weighs about 275 pounds.

Because we were so far from the activity, the nest had been made and eggs laid by the time we got there, but we did get to see the turtle covering up the nest and crawling back into the Gulf, and you can see those pictures here.  The Friends of Lovers Key has a nice website, and they have a picture that Brie took and you can actually see the eggs here.

OK, the excitement is over, and it's back to "work" for us.  WOO HOO!!  A gopher tortoise!  On it's way home, and not very impressed with us.

And into the burrow (up to 40' in length) it goes.  Sort of.  Most everything this animal does is deliberate and fairly slow compared to most other animals.  But then it lives a lot longer than most other animals too, so maybe there's a lesson there, eh?  Is this a great lifestyle or what?????

What this series of pictures attempts to do is show the effect a Virginia Creeper can have on a small Sable Palm.  Those berries will eventually turn purple and provide food for a variety of animals and birds but are poisonous to humans.  Gives me a chance to slap Barb's hand.  She's always trying out different things to see what they taste like.  Seagrapes, Cocoplum, etc.  Be fun if we took the time to actually make some seagrape wine, wouldn't it?

There's a sable palm that's not going to mature.  Matter of fact, it's already dead.  Won't take much of a storm to put it fully in the canal, either.

Even with the drought we're having, Florida still manages to stay pretty much green.  And Slimy's pond (he's our resident alligator) is lower than usual, but still attracts the birds, which is good for Slimy, as he's eaten all the fish out of here already.

I wonder if it's possible for us to go onto the Black Island Nature Trail without a camera.  Probably not.  This is a Nickerbean plant and its seed pod fully ready to drop its seeds.  It is one of the plants we love to hate because of its claw-shaped thorns that are so terribly sharp (and painful). But it's still an interesting plant and no, Barb doesn't know what a Nickerbean bean tastes like.  Yet.  Actually before the pod turns brown, it is a bright green like the rest of the plant, and the seeds inside are a beautiful, shiny green about the size of a large grape but with a rounder shape.

One of those vacant spots at the Bonita Springs Shell Club table belongs to Barb.  The far end where the glue gun is in its holster.

The first five pictures here are a bit of whimsy with shells.  Barb made the funny looking little fish, swimming around the coral branch.  We don't know who made the motorcycle kids, but they've sure got a vivid imagination.

And lastly, another bit of whimsy, but this bit by God.  See that rainbow in the cloud?  Friend sent us a picture of a "fire rainbow" in some clouds that was a lot more dramatic than this, but this'll do for us.  The rainbow is in the upper right side of the cloud.

Son Doug doing what he loves.  Eating dinner made by somebody in the family when he's on a road trip.  We made him come with us on the turtle patrol next morning, and he was a good sport about it.

He has a hotrod/car restoration business in St. Louis, Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods, and will occasionally make trips to pick up and deliver cars nearby, and when he does he'll visit.  This truck is new to his business and still carries the colors and labels from the race team he bought it from.  Didn't keep us from drooling on it.

Tight quarters, but does the job just fine.  That black intruding in those pictures is because I was using the built-in flash on the camera and forgot to remove the lens hood on the short lens.  I've been told that one of the main differences between a professional photographer and a rank amateur is that the professional won't show his lousy stuff.  Guess you know where that leaves me, eh?

Now, what kind of daddy wouldn't be proud of his kid for having a cool truck/trailer like this, eh?  I was impressed, and so was Barb!  That's a 1973 Mustang convertible up there.  Double decker trailer.  Tailgate goes up flat, and the car drives off onto the upper rails.  Cool!

Admiring the "office" in the trailer, complete with kitchen and bathroom.  Sure glad I'm as old as I am or I'd try to go play with my kid again.  This looks like way too much fun to be able to make any money at it, doesn't it?  Check out his website if you like cars at all.

Off he goes until next time.  Probably have different colors and logos when we see the truck again.  NO, he's not picking his nose!  Barb would break his arm for that.  He's just waving at us.

And that's it for now.  A dolphin doing its thing while a bather and fisherman are doing theirs.  Is this a great lifestyle or what?  Are we "Lovin' it at Lovers Key" or what?  Can it really get any better than this?

Somebody sent me this picture, but I have no idea who took it.  I'd sure like to be this good someday, but in the meantime I'll enjoy the hard work of others.  I've included it here even though I can't credit the photographer, just to give an example of the kind of photography I aspire to.  Besides, both Barb and I enjoy watching the osprey hunt, and this is something we've never ever seen.

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