POTR #23 Out Of Florida

PEACE ON THE ROAD
Out Of Florida
May 15, 2006

We have ended our visit to Florida that is if you are willing to call November 30 to May 9 a visit. We have seen a lot of places that are very special and seen flowers that are unlike any we have ever seen. One thing that I have found funny is that as we came into Florida we were closing camps behind us and now that we have been working our out of Florida many camps are closing behind us again. A lot of the northern camps are set up so that there is no way to keep the water in the lines from freezing, so they close for the winter. In the south and particularly in the southwest the weather gets too hot for people to want to camp during the summer. My understanding is that there are more camps that stay open in Florida all summer than there are in the Southwest. We have stayed in camps in Florida that are open the year round, but during the summer the only people that will be there are the maintenance workers.

A GREAT BLUE HERON WAITING FOR A MEAL TO COME WITHIN RANGE

I have always enjoyed seeing birds. When I was a kid in Kansas I always enjoyed seeing the huge flocks of blackbirds and red winged black birds that would come past our farm at certain times of the year. I saw quail and pheasant and once in a while a saw Great Blue Heron. It was always a thrill to see a Great Blue Heron; down in Florida I have seen a lot of them. In addition there have been flocks of Egrets, Wood Storks and many of the various ducks and smaller birds, every once in a while we would see a few Roseate Spoonbills. Texans call the Roseate Spoonbill the Texas Flamingo because there are no Flamingos in the state. I have never seen anyplace that has a greater population of buzzard than there are in Florida. There were many places where the sky would be crowded with flying buzzards. There are both the Turkey Buzzard and the Black Buzzard in most areas. Some areas seem to have a population only the black variety. Bird watching and identification has been a lot of fun for us, so we often seek areas that will have a large bird population.

I have seen and done a lot of things while in Florida. One of my great desires while we were in Florida this winter was to see and photograph a wild, free roaming manatee. We went to a manatee viewing park that had warm water discharge from a power plant and only saw a nose, or bit of a back or a tail. But the water was so very dark that we could never see the actual animal. I actually believe that there were several animals in the pool when we were there. The next power plant viewing area we visited looked about the same but there was no sign of any animals. When the end of April was nigh I was giving up hope of seeing a manatee. By April the Gulf of Mexico waters are warm enough for the manatee to leave the power plant discharges and warm springs to go out into the ocean to forage.


MANATEE AT HOMOSASSA SPRINGS

Then we went to the Homosassa Springs State Wildlife Park and we at least saw captive manatee. There are six manatees there that are held captive or in rehabilitation until they can be released. One manatee has been released three times and has come back with injuries each time. The spring discharges over three million gallons of seventy-degree water every day all year long. In the cold winter there are hundreds of free or wild manatees that come to the area, or at least the residents use the word hundreds. For those who know as little about manatees as I did a year and a half ago I will share some of my new knowledge. Manatees are large slow moving herbivorous mammals, eating sixty to one hundred pounds of vegetation a day. They are related to the elephant. They have an average weight of eight hundred to a thousand pounds and ten feet in length. Some have been twelve feet long and weighed as much a thirty-five hundred pounds. They give birth every two to three years after a gestation period of thirteen months to a fifty to seventy pound calf. Their biggest danger in the wild is the props on motorboats. The greatest other cause of death for them is cold water, thus in winter they seek warm springs and electric power plant discharges. The ones we photographed were in rehab but while in a restaurant on the Homosassa River a wild one swam by only a few feet away from us. If you ever get to Florida in the winter make a point of finding a place to view them. They are so large and slow moving that they will amaze you.

The flowers in Florida are impressive all winter long, and in the spring they get better. There has been so many flowers that I have never seen before I don’t know which one to show you. There are many flowering tree that range from a few feet to towering giants that are fifty foot tall. The blooms of the magnolia tree are larger than any other flower that we have seen. The magnolia tree is all through the south, but of course it blooms earliest in Florida. There are many ponds of water that are sprinkled with white water lilies. The roadsides are often covered with flowers of all color and shapes. Flowers are all over. To us it was great to see wild flowers blooming on New Years Day.

FLOWERS THAT COVERED A FLORIDA FIELD

For my birthday Erma bought me a Nikon camera. If the truth is admitted, and she said it one day, she knew that sooner or later I would buy one myself, but she made it a gift. I doubt I would have bought as good a camera as she convinced me to select. I cannot say that the camera I had was inadequate but it had certain limitations. Specifically it did not have interchangeable lens, thus limited telephoto ability, and its focus and shooting speed caused me to miss shots I wanted. My old camera is also a Nikon, and either one can do things that I don’t even know how to utilize. My new Nikon can be attached to a GPS and it will record the precise location the picture is taken. I can put it on a tripod and set it to take a series of pictures at any interval at a time in the future. For instance I could set it to start taking pictures some time tomorrow, take a picture every thirty minutes till the battery went dead or it had taken from two hundred to over a thousand pictures. The quality of the picture determining the number of pictures that can be taken. With an adapter I could eliminate the battery and plug into a 110-volt outlet. By a simple switch movement I can take up to five pictures a second as long as I hold the shutter-release button down. Those are just a few things that I have learned to do with it. The first time I really used my new Nikon it was photographing the manatee and other animals at the Homosassa Springs Wild Animal Park, and I took nearly three hundred pictures. I sure am glad it is digital, I could not afford to buy and develop that much 35mm film. I can take a hundred pictures of a single flower and discard ninety-nine and it does not cost me a cent. I could not have taken the picture of the bumblebee landing on the flower without the new Nikon. As you can guess I am very happy with it. When I know more about using the features I will likely enjoy it more.

A BUMBLE BEE ABOUT TO LAND ON A SWAMP FLOWER

It may seen a bit odd that we do not know where we are going next, but that is the way we are living our lives. Often we have only a general area of the country where we will stay until a couple of weeks before we are going there. I have met a lot of people that know years in advance, but not us. There is a large area of the USA we want to see and we would like to see it all right now, but that is not possible. Some time this summer we will be Rochester for a few weeks, but when and for how long is still an unknown. I am hoping that we can make it up into Maine this summer and into Canada. I had hoped to do that last summer, but life happenings got in the way. The weather here in Florida has so been nice I feel like it has been summer instead of winter, so now I will have the real true summer to enjoy.

Till Later This Is Doug Of
PEACE ON THE ROAD