Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Winding Down
8:54 AM | 
Posted by
Gabby Faye |
It must be about time to return to Michigan. The juvenile Sandhill Cranes are starting to annoy the dickens out of me. Three of them squawked all night last night, off and on. Now today they have been at it since dawn. Don't they ever sleep? I may prefer the teenage humans around the lake who play loud rap music and bounce a basketball. At least THEY don't do it for more than a couple of hours and very rarely.
We visited friends yesterday about 2 hours South of us. I was amazed by the differences in wildlife. Their Anoles are so much larger than ours. One seemed about the size of a small chipmunk. I love our little guys; Lizzies, my granddaughter calls them.
We also saw big Iguanas just sitting alongside the road, and in culverts. The ones we saw were dark, not the bright green of the one that took up residence in the wreckage of our shed in 2004 after the hurricanes. The Animal Shelter assured me that an iguana that big and that color would not be living this far North in the wild, but must have been someone's pet that escaped in the storm. The fact that he ran to me for protection when the Shelter man tried to catch him made us think he may have belonged to a woman, and probably lived in her screen room, many of which wound up at the bottom of our lake. That night the temps went into the 40s and the shelter said the Iguana would have been stressed, and maybe even died from the cold. I didn't feel so bad about calling them. They assured me he would find good home if they couldn't reunite him with the original owner. (I will post a photo of him here when I get back North where the old photos are.)
The parrots South of us were another surprise. Several times we saw small flocks of 10 or so flying from tree to tree. Once in the tree, however, they camouflaged so well I couldn't find one to take a photo of it. They strike me as exotic as much as the Peacocks running wild an hour North of us. Looks like I still have a lot more pictures to try and get next year.
All along the turnpike, as we headed home, there were Armadillos at their evening feeding. There was no way I could snap pictures of them from the moving car and the traffic was too heavy to pull over. Some day. Those strange animals have fascinated me since my grandmother used to have an Armadillo "shell" for a bizarre fruit basket in the middle of her dining room table back North.
We visited friends yesterday about 2 hours South of us. I was amazed by the differences in wildlife. Their Anoles are so much larger than ours. One seemed about the size of a small chipmunk. I love our little guys; Lizzies, my granddaughter calls them.
We also saw big Iguanas just sitting alongside the road, and in culverts. The ones we saw were dark, not the bright green of the one that took up residence in the wreckage of our shed in 2004 after the hurricanes. The Animal Shelter assured me that an iguana that big and that color would not be living this far North in the wild, but must have been someone's pet that escaped in the storm. The fact that he ran to me for protection when the Shelter man tried to catch him made us think he may have belonged to a woman, and probably lived in her screen room, many of which wound up at the bottom of our lake. That night the temps went into the 40s and the shelter said the Iguana would have been stressed, and maybe even died from the cold. I didn't feel so bad about calling them. They assured me he would find good home if they couldn't reunite him with the original owner. (I will post a photo of him here when I get back North where the old photos are.)
The parrots South of us were another surprise. Several times we saw small flocks of 10 or so flying from tree to tree. Once in the tree, however, they camouflaged so well I couldn't find one to take a photo of it. They strike me as exotic as much as the Peacocks running wild an hour North of us. Looks like I still have a lot more pictures to try and get next year.
All along the turnpike, as we headed home, there were Armadillos at their evening feeding. There was no way I could snap pictures of them from the moving car and the traffic was too heavy to pull over. Some day. Those strange animals have fascinated me since my grandmother used to have an Armadillo "shell" for a bizarre fruit basket in the middle of her dining room table back North.
Labels:
wildlife photography Florida
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