Vulnerable Critters

The little critters of nature. They don't know that they're ugly.

Some of these photos were taken with the worst digital camera I ever owned--a small Samsung. It was awful, but I bought it when we were out in the middle of nowhere and our main camera had broken (the one I had dropped off a 50-foot waterfall two years before). You do what you have to do.

Hermit crab, near Panama City, Florida.

This little raccoon was casing the campsite trying to figure out how to steal food from us. This was just as he was giving up the fight and leaving. He had been stationed on a branch above us trying to get an angle.

Cormorant doing his cormorant thing. Cedar Key, Florida.

I'd never thought of the Brown pelican as particularly colorful until I stopped to look at this one in Cedar Key, Florida.

Box tortoise on the trail to Little Lost Cove Cliffs here in North Caorlina.

Taken with the crappy Samsung. White tail fawn. Big Spring National Park, Missouri.

Doe in Manatee Spring State Park, Florida.

Ground squirrel in Joshua Tree National Park, California. At about 5,000 feet above sea level.

Red-winged blackbird, Panama City, Florida.

This Suwanee River slider was laying eggs in the sand at Wakulla State Park, Florida.

Some kind of evil looking caterpillar on a rock along the Appalachian Trail near McAfee Knob, in Virginia.

Lizard. De Leon Springs State Park, Florida.

Critters Again

One thing that I can say about Florida:

It is freaking packed with wildlife. I go to many wild places in the eastern USA, and often I visit these so-called wilderness areas without once seeing anything more exotic than a beetle or spider. (Yes, such creatures have their charm, but I want to see more traditionally attractive wildlife.) For instance, just before my trip to Manatee Springs, I hiked down into the Linville Gorge, easily one of the wildest and most rugged places in the eastern half of the continent. And I didn't see a single bit of wildlife. Nothing. Nada. But if you visit a parkland or wildlife refuge in Florida you will almost certainly encounter wildlife, and lots of it. So it was on this trip. We are never disappointed when it comes to this aspect of visiting the unspoiled corners of our southernmost state.

A cormorant posing for us as we paddled along the Suwanee River on our first day at Manatee Springs State Park, before the flood waters got too deep and the river debris too heavy for paddling the current.

The ever-present common painted turtles. These guys were rather large, having avoided their two most potent predators, alligators and great herons.

Communal vulture tree. Filled with one of our two species of carrion eating raptors: the black vulture.

A closeup of a black vulture. These are actually very intelligent and impressive birds. I rather like them.

To partially steal a line:

"Old raccoon in the tree
Has his hungry eye on me."

This guy had been sitting in the tree above our campsite watching us until I started spying back. He was waiting, I'm sure, for a chance to steal something from the campsite. The raccoons at Manatee Springs were not nearly so bold as the ones at Blue Springs. After I eyed him for a bit, he climbed down and hauled ass into the forest.

Yeah, yeah. I know I opened up this blog with my vertebrate-centered chauvinism. However, this caterpillar we saw at Rainbow Springs was so impressive that I ended up taking about thirty photos of it. This was the only one that came out halfway decent. A more complicated critter you will never see in the so-called "higher" animals. (Click to embiggen and be stundified.)

One of a number of brown pelicans on the waterfront in downtown Cedar Key. Once critically endangered, they now are common since DDT was banned.

The deer in this part of Florida are quite, quite small. Not as tiny as the Key Deer, but pretty darned little. This doe was the biggest one we saw, and she would be dwarfed by a local white-tailed deer. I suspect she was pregnant. She looks rather more plump than any of the others we saw. I caught her in mid-slurp here, as she was licking her lips.

On the coldest day of our trip, a ranger came to our campsite to inform us that the spring was full of manatees. So we hustled down to get some shots. The rangers had the spring "off limits" to swimming. Believe it or not, many people wanted to get in with the manatees. Not that I was stunned at that (I enjoyed swimming with them last year), but because it was so damned cold. But then I was reminded that the water remains a constant 72 degrees no matter what. So the water would have felt quite comfortable. At any rate, we enjoyed watching them swim about and graze. I got this shot as this large individual rose to the surface for a gulp of air.

"What?" You ask. "No alligators?"

Indeed. This was the first trip to Florida that I've ever taken in which I didn't see any alligators. We saw only one--briefly--and a small one at that--while we were paddling down the Rainbow River. And we're not sure that it was a small alligator or a medium-sized alligator snapping turtle. All we caught were the ridges on its tail, so it might have been the snapping turtle.

Awwwwwwwww...

So cute it makes you want to puke:

My Casita and old truck at the Ammons Branch Campground.

Argh! (Critters redux!)

There was some kind of internet glitch with my post yesterday that ate all of the photos. Rather than reload them all, I’ll just post something else.

These are a bare few of my favorite animal photos from my various trips the past two years to National Parks, state parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas.

This first one was on a visit to Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina. It’s an unusual area—a classic monadnock. The high area has lots of exposed rock, and some spectacular waterfalls. I had been hiking in the hot summer sun and visited this waterfall where I took a bath. After washing the sweat off, I noticed that the stream passed through a narrow grotto beyond the falls and so I walked down to take a look. Inside the grotto, on the rock wall, was this very tiny bird nest which contained a single extremely small egg. It could have been a hummingbird nest—I don’t know. But I took this photo and it remains one of my favorites.

The next photo was taken in Silver River State Park in Florida. The Silver River emerges directly from the ground, its headwaters being the absolutely stunning and tremendous Silver Springs, around which was built a commercial amusement park. My family and I put our canoe into the Silver River at a county park and paddled up the river to the Silver Springs, thus avoiding any nasty admission fees. We’d been told that the area around the river was home to a large and growing population of feral rhesus monkeys. Escapees, according to tales, from various Tarzan movies filmed in the vicinity. The State of Florida has decided that the monkeys pose no risk to the area as an invasive species, and their numbers have increased somewhat. If you are lucky while paddling along the Silver River, you may encounter them. We were lucky enough to spot some, one of which I was able to photograph.

This guy had one of the most symmetrically perfect racks of any whitetail buck I’ve ever encountered. He was in a field inside Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While certainly no record, he was just one of the most spectacular deer I’ve ever seen.

Continuing the deer theme, these were part of a small herd of extremely small Key deer that we saw on Big Pine Key in the Florida Keys. Endangered, these are a sub-species of the whitetail deer. Adapted to island ecology, these deer are very, very small. A fully grown buck is no larger than a medium-sized dog. This doe and fawns were very tiny, indeed.

While on one of my hikes to locate and photograph the world champion Sag Branch poplar tree, I noticed this red newt along he Boogerman Trail in the Cataloochee area of the park. It was chilly that morning, and the newt was sluggish, and in the midst of chowing down on an earthworm.

This fellow was sitting in the Silver River as we were cruising under paddle-power toward Silver Springs. I've seen many alligators in my travels, but this guy just seemed more than others to want us to go swimming.

These big boys were sitting along the river in Rock Island State Park in Tennessee as we were paddling by. Later, while rock-hopping, I found out why they were gathered there. They were sharing an enormous gar-fish lying on the rocks.

We met up with this hawk (red-shouldered hawk?) while camping at Juniper Springs Recreation Area in the Ocala National Forest in Florida. He kept trying to steal the steaks off our grill, but the heat kept him at bay. The ranger told us that he was a particularly talented thief and generally got away with quite a lot of people food every day.

This last photo is one of my favorites, if a bit blurry. We were paddling down a stream in Florida called Juniper Run, through the Juniper Prarie Wilderness Area (Ocala National Forest). We came around a bend in the crystal clear stream to see this racoon in the water, and just beyond a whitetail deer. Off to the right, out of sight of my lense, was a wild turkey. It was just very neat and very exciting to encounter so many different large animals together in one spot in a wilderness setting.

What They Do!

Well, they’ smilin’ in yo’ face.
All th’ time dey wanna take yo’ place.

The animals.

All of my pals and relatives know that I have a unique way of looking at the critter world. The animals that co-populate the Earth with us in ever-shrinking numbers as we squeeze them out of their habitats as we move ever and ever into more and more living space.

I’m not sure, exactly, whence my feelings about the other creatures of this planet. I like to blame Ernest Thompson Seton, who wrote so well and so sympathetically of the lives of the hunted. One of his greatest works is entitled Wild Animals I Have Known. Known. Not “seen”. Or “killed” (although he did kill them, from time to time). Or he could have used the word “witnessed”, or some similar term. But he didn’t do this. He knew these wild animals. The way you might know a person you meet. He elevated animals to the level of humans. That always stuck with me, even though I was probably only eight or nine years old the first time I encountered his work.

When I see an animal, I wonder what they’re thinking or feeling. Most people look upon almost all animals as some kind of automaton; pre-programmed by genetics to do a specific thing at a specific time under a certain stimulus. Well, one could argue that about Homo sapiens, but it wouldn’t fly. I’ve watched animals doing things that took conscious thought and decision-making abilities. And I’ve seen emotions in animals. Fear, of course. And aggression. But sadness, too.

So on my recent vacation, as with almost all of my vacation, I look for animals. I like to see them, to know that they’re still there in some numbers. They reassure me that we haven’t quite destroyed all of their homes and all of the habitat necessary for their continued survival. I like to see them as they go about their lives, which are often far more detailed than most could imagine.



We encountered the usual suspects on this trip. Because we were in a bird sanctuary, we saw a lot of birds of many types. Storks, and ibises, and cranes, and gulls, and terns, and raptors, and pelicans, and so on. We saw quite a number of alligators. We happened across a mink as he was hunting along the edge of the bay one afternoon. He looked back at us for a time and let us get quite close before he decided we might pose something of a threat and he vanished from our sight so quickly he might have been a passing shadow.



All of these creatures that we watched were rather larger, more complex animals. Birds, and reptiles, and mammals. The familiar trio. But on our last night of vacation, we decided to tramp out onto the beach late at night to see what was there. We hiked out in the cool far away from the campground and found a spot at the edge of the dunes, sat down, and waited. The night was very dark (no moon), and the breeze was blowing briskly off the sea. Every so often we would switch on the flashlight we’d brought along and shine it up and down the beach, looking for something to see.



After some time, we did see something. A small, pale form appeared far down to our left. Something about the size of my fist. I immediately recognized it as a ghost crab. We turned off the light and waited for a bit. Shining the light again, we saw that he had moved closer to us, closing the distance between him and us from about fifty feet to thirty feet. Mainly, ghost crabs run like Hell when they spy a human. For some reason, this one was coming closer to us.

We waited a couple more minutes and turned the light on again. This time, we caught him in movement and he froze. He was now about twelve feet away and he was definitely coming to us. There were miles of beach and many yards of territory that would have taken him far from us, and yet he was actually moving closer to this pair of giant naked apes. He certainly wasn’t acting like any ghost crab I’ve ever seen.

Once more, we turned off the light for a few minutes, and then turned it back on.

The little fellow was less than two feet away from us; his eyestalks fully emerged from his carapace as he checked us out. I’d never thought of a crustacean or something of that order as having any kind of feeling beyond pain or hunger. But here this little guy was, exhibiting what I can only call…

…Curiosity.



As I said, I’ve always had a way of looking at the wild world that’s always seemed slightly askew from most people I know. And I reckon I’m just a little more askew after this encounter than I was before it. Because I’m convinced this “brainless” little ghost crab just wanted to know what the hell two huge mammals were doing on his beach at this hour of the night when the sands were supposed to belong to him and his fellows. (Or she and her ladies, as the case may certainly have been.)

A curious ghost crab.

One more ghost for the blog.