Big Predator and Tiny Prey

When I was taking the following photos I didn't actually realize that I was witnessing a predator catching and killing a tiny prey animal. Once I downloaded the photos and took a close look at the action, I realized that I had recorded a very young fish being captured and eaten by a Great egret. When I looked at the photos close-up, I felt sorry for the little fish. He was doing his best to keep from being eaten, but failed.

Still...it's a part of the cycle of life that Mother Nature has dictated. The following sad drama took place on the south beach of Fort DeSoto Park in Pinellas County, Florida, on the Gulf Coast.

I had been photographing the egret. It was at this point where I realized he'd brought something out of the water that he had captured in his beak.

It was only when I got a chance to sit in the shade and expand the image on the camera screen that I saw the bird had nabbed a little baby puffer fish. A puffer fish defends itself by ingesting air and puffing up like a balloon in an attempt to make a predator let go of it, thinking the fish would be too big to swallow.

The poor little puffer fish was puffed up as big as he could make himself. He was trying like heck to make the giant bird think he was too big to eat.

But he was just too tiny for the ploy to work. The egret swallowed him right down. "Gung!"

And then after eating that tiny, itsy-bitsy morsel, the egret turned and continued on his way, searching for more fish to catch and eat. Poor little puffer fish!

Fort DeSoto Park, Third Visit, Part One

Carole and I started our vacation down to Florida (we go roughly once per year) by hooking up the Casita travel trailer, loading all of our various supplies onto the truck, and heading out about 8:00 pm on a Wednesday. What we generally do when we choose to start late that way is to drive as far as I feel comfortable (until I get too tired to drive) and then pull into a state rest area and park to get a few hours of sleep in the trailer. We tried this at a rest area near the SC/GA border and there was no space due to the fact that long-haul truckers had taken up all of the space. Which is okay, because you don't want a hard working truck driver falling asleep at the wheel.

So, we drove down into Georgia and stopped at first one, and then another state rest area, finding both of them also taken over by the big rigs. After that I kept my eyes peeled for a Cracker Barrel Restaurant, as I'd read they didn't mind RV folk parking overnight in their lot since most such folk wake up, go inside, and order breakfast. Ironically, we ended up pulling into a Cracker Barrel in my hometown of Brunswick GA around 1:00 am or so. And we slept there, got up in the morning, and had breakfast in the restaurant.

Then we made all safe haste to get on down to St. Petersburg and the Pinellas County administered Fort DeSoto Park. We'd been to the park twice before--the first time having discovered it completely by accident while driving around--and it never ceases to amaze me. The infrastructure in the park is of the highest quality: roads, parking lots, ocean/bay access, docks, bath facilities, campgrounds, offices, historical structures, picnic areas, etc. It's hard to believe that it's a county park and not a full-fledged state park.

It exists on about 1400 acres shared between several islands connected by narrow causeways. If you like bird life, this is your place. Well over 300 recorded species of birds make this park at least a temporary stopping off point. There are decent numbers of resident ospreys--a bird which I dearly love to watch and photograph. I found out on this trip that there are now several nesting pairs of Bald eagles, but I didn't see any of them.

Unlike on our last trip, we brought our kayaks with us. While you can rent kayaks and canoes in the park, we like to bring our own. We put in at one of the spots along the bayou near our campsite (site #100) and paddled around observing the bird life and aquatic creatures who made their presence known from time to time. We were lucky enough to encounter two manatees, but as the water in the lagoon is a bit turbid, I only got a couple of photos when one of the big mammals came to the surface to get a breath of air.

As for the campground: it is huge. It offers 238 sites, all with electric and water hookups. Most of the sites have lots of vegetation on either side, giving you a plenty of privacy. And there are many live oaks with their sheltering branches offering shade. Many sites are waterfront, either on the lagoon, or on the bay allowing access to the Gulf. There are extremely nice bathhouses sprinkled through the campground with flush toilets, sinks, hot showers, and laundry facilities. (The laundry prices went up quite a lot since our last visit so it's a bit pricey to wash and dry a load of clothes compared to our previous trip.)

One thing that is unique about this park is that you feel as if you are far away from cities and traffic, but you have to drive through St. Petersburg to get to the park (tolls to get in total $1.75). We had picked a day to go into St. Pete to have breakfast, visit the Salvador Dali Museum, hit some shops, have supper, and then go back to the campground. Normally we don't do city-stuff on our vacations, but because of the campground's proximity to the city and all that it offers, we made an exception.

My only complaints about the trip have nothing whatsoever to do with the park itself, or with the city. But I have noticed on my last three vacations to Florida that the amount and diversity of wildlife has diminished. This could be just the luck of the roll and we've merely hit some bare patches in the continuity. But I have been disturbed to note that I am not seeing the numbers and varieties of wild animals that we normally encounter when in the state.

Bottom line: you could do a whole lot worse than booking a camping vacation at Fort DeSoto Park. But if you do want to stay there, book well in advance. We had to book our site five months before we used them, and were lucky to get the site that we wanted.

Our site (#100). Directly across from the bathhouse and laundry.

The bathhouse in our section of the campground with accompanying amazing oak.

Our spot at North Beach. We think this is the best of the beaches in the Park. There's a big sandbar just off the beach that becomes accessible at lower tides and you can wade or swim out to look for seashells and sea critters. No crowds on the weekdays--stupendously crowded on Saturdays and Sundays.

One of the trails I hiked on the island.

A pterodactyl...I mean Brown pelican that sailed over me on its way somewhere else.

Part of the park's namesake: Fort DeSoto. Built during the Spanish-American War when we took most of Spain's colonies away from them. The fort was armed and manned (along with the one on Egmont Key), but of course they never saw any battles.

An inner section of the fort.

Me, lounging on one of the big mortars/cannons/whatever.

A great egret that I photographed as it caught (and then ate) a small pufferfish (which you can see in its beak).

I don't know anyone in this photo. they were just in my way when I took this composite image of the Salvador Dali Museum building. Designed by Yann Weymouth, it is sometimes called "The Enigma".

I call this one: "American with Dali".

I'll post more stuff tomorrow, time willing.

Fort DeSoto, Hillsborough River

We just got home from our trip to mid-Florida Gulf Coast. I will post much stuff tomorrow. For now, just a few photos.

A great egret with a captured pufferfish.

Osprey with big fish.

Newly hatched moorhen chicks. Complete with vestigial dinosaur claws on their tiny wings. (My only opportunity to photograph them was from above.)

Another Cool Camping Trip

One of the coolest places Carole and I ever hiked was the abandoned city on Egmont Key in Florida. Once upon a time it was a thriving military town. But the fort was decommissioned and the population removed from the island. It became a ghost town, then a smuggling point for illegal aliens. The local police got sick of having to police the town (which was then pretty much intact), so they burned it to the ground one night "by accident".

We also had one of our all-time favorite campsites at the Fort DeSoto County Park just outside of Tampa.

This was our campsite at Fort DeSoto County Park near Tampa. Campsites really do not get any better. Separated from other sites by lots of vegetation. Full shade. Waterfront. Water and electric hookups. Across the street from the bathrooms, hot showers, and laundry facilities. Quiet. Tons of wildlife. We loved this place.

We took a boat ride to Egmont Key State Park and explored the abandoned Naval fortifications.

There are miles of these amazing brick roads that once took you through the city, which is not all but gone except for some foundations and a few standing walls.

The Egmont Key lighthouse. The metal housing on the top was removed and used for scrap during WWII. There is a movement afoot to have it replaced with a new housing and, as I understand it, most of the private funding has been collected to have this done.

This was the first time we encountered an ocean-going manatee on one of our trips.

Sea Grape

At our great campsite at Fort DeSoto Park (Pinellas County), we had a tree growing on one side that I'd never seen. It only took me a short time to be informed that it's called a Sea Grape. The tree has enormous leaves that, apparently, were used as plates by the native people who lived here before the Europeans arrived. Indeed, the leaves are that large.

But the strangest thing about the tree that we noticed after a few days was that it created new blossoms every morning. The new blossoms were bright yellow. However, by the end of the afternoon those yellow blossoms had turned from bright yellow to dark red. And on the subsequent morning almost all of those red blossoms had been shed and new yellow ones had replaced them. On and on.

Blossom in the morning.

Blossom in the afternoon.

The local squirrels would climb the sea grape, manage their ways to the ends of the limber branches, and consume the small nubs of fruit that grow there. It was not unusual to see the squirrels with their faces messy with the greenish remains of the sea grape's fruit.

Dinner is served! (On this leaf.)

Three Campsites

Carole and I love Florida parks. Everywhere we stay the facilities are generally excellent and most often superlative. There are few state parks or National Forest campgrounds anywhere we've stayed that even come close to the parks and forest campgrounds in Florida.

On this trip, we used three different campgrounds. Our first two nights were spent at the Salt Spring Recreation Area Campground which is a National Forest site. The US government bought it from private concerns in the 1970s and ever since it has been a Federal area. Because it was originally in private hands and was a commercial campground, it has one thing at every site that few other Forest Service campgrounds can boast: sewer hookups for travel trailers. This was the only public campground where we've stayed that had this option. It was nice to not have to pull up to a dump station and wait in line to dump the gray and black water tanks.

Our campsite at Salt Springs.

After the second night we moved on down to our primary destination, the Fort DeSoto Park in Pinellas County in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. We'd found this park by accident on a joy-ride while visiting central Florida several years before. Back then we were floored by the park and thought that it was one of the most beautiful beach state parks we'd ever seen. It was (and remains) one of the most beautiful oceanfront public parks we've ever visited, but we were wrong about one thing:

It isn't a state park. It's a county park! Pinellas County has, in Fort DeSoto Park, one of the greatest county parks I've ever heard of. The place is pretty big (over 3K acres) and it's hard to believe that you're so close to such a huge urban area. The beach and forest areas are pristine, packed with wildlife, and there is so much to do that the idea of leaving the island seems to constantly be a bad one. At the risk of making the place more popular than it should be, I have to say that it's one of the finest parks we've ever visited. I can't say enough good things about it.

Campsite at Fort DeSoto Park, front view.

Casita and stuff as we were unpacking. (The accordion contraption is a clothesline for drying clothes.)

Rear view of the campsite at Fort DeSoto. The sites are really big to accommodate the enormous rigs rich folk have.

This was the view we had from our site, looking out into the bay.

One of the many, many, many bird visitors we had at our campsite at Fort DeSoto. They would generally arrive in larger numbers at low tide, as this ibis did.


After our five-night stay at Fort DeSoto we pulled up stakes and headed for O'Leno State Park. We chose this one not because of the park environs, but because it's so near Ichetucknee Springs State Park which was our main destination for the last two days of our vacation. Once more, we were rewarded by fine facilities in Florida State Parks. The site was spacious, shady, and had water/electric hookups. And we had only a nine-mile drive to the Ichetucknee Springs and River complex where we wanted to spend most of our time.

That said, O'Leno is a good destination in and of itself. The park is beautiful, has a lot to offer in the way of swimming, canoeing, fishing, hiking, photography, and history.

Just after our arrival at O'Leno State Park.

After a day of swimming at Ichetucknee Springs.

Brief video of part of our fantastic kayak ride down the deserted Ichetucknee River.

Birdland

I took this shot yesterday afternoon at our campsite at Fort De Soto Park near Tampa/St. Pete. The bird life here in phenomenal. This is an osprey. It was scoping the water for fish. I got lucky with the telephoto lens.

"Buy THE FLOCK by James Robert Smith. Best novel I've ever read!" King of the Ospreys.