TARPON BAY and LOCAL EAGLES

Drove to Sanibel Island one day this week  — battling heavy in-season traffic all the way!  Everybody wants to go to the beach.  We forget that fact at least once a year.   This time, we also forgot that the wildlife drive in Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge is closed on Friday.   (We go to the Island to see birds, not to lie around on the beach).   

 

 

Royal Tern

 

So our outing plans took a small "tern" and we hopped on one of the Refuge's pontoon boats for a Tarpon Bay nature cruise.  

 

 

The Tarpon Bay Estuary is also part of the Wildlife Refuge — we boated past several Rookery Islands (where the birds looked like white flowers from the distance — that's all the closer the boat got, for the safety of the boat and even more important for the welfare of the birds.)   The Mangrove trees are important for so many reasons.  They provide habitat for wildlife and a natural barrier against wind and storms for animals and people on land.   

 

 

 

Brown Pelican

While the Royal Tern  claimed Mile Marker 15, Post #21 belonged to this napping Brown Pelican.  We saw other terns, gulls, cormorants, egrets, ospreys,  and pelicans on  posts and on the edges of the water — it was a windy day though and with the motion of the boat (and shaky hands on the photographer) , pictures were hard to come by.

 

 

I took the above picture on the causeway  as we headed off the Island toward home.  Note the blowing palm tree at the bottom … it was a a good day for the wind-surfers!   

We're fortunate to have a variety of natural places that are easy to get to for day trips.   Some are even closer — on another  day at home last week,  I stopped at the Eagle Pasture on the way to do errands:

 

 

 I saw at least 50 Cattle Egrets, plenty of small birds, and several very pretty horses.  And only a tiny glimpse of an Eagle's head peeking out of the nest.  (The nest tree is the skinny slash pine in the center picture (center of the center picture).   No Eagle pictures this time, but as always, it is a nice little nature stop on a day otherwise dedicated to mundane activities.  The pasture is right across the street from a supermarket shopping center and on the way to just about every other place we have to go to routinely.  

The pictures below are from the archives.  Two years ago I had much better photographer's luck with these neighbors.

Our Eagle nest — 2018

And our pair of Eagles had better luck also that year, successfully raising a pair of Eaglets.   The lower three pictures are that year's  "babies"  — just ready to fledge and (in the center) actually flying away for the first time.    

This year, sadly,  only one of the pair's eggs hatched and that baby died from what  was later discovered to be from ingesting rat poison. Adult Bald Eagles will take both living and dead prey — fish, birds, small mammals).   Now,  at about the time their nestlings would usually be fledging, the pair are incubating a second hatch — two more eggs.   This is very late for this climate, so it remains to be seen what happens.    There is a very active webcam site for this pair, so you can watch the progress  from wherever you live!  There are a lot of ads on the site, but the camera angles are good and there are links to several informative sites.    Just google Southwest Florida Eagle cam.    It's a good and easy way to learn about these iconic birds.

 

LINKING this week to the following sharing opportunities.  Thank you to all of the hosts:

 

 

MOSAIC MONDAY;   ALL SEASONS; THROUGH MY LENS;   OUR WORLD ON TUESDAY;  TRAVEL PHOTO SOUVENIRS;  SAY CHEESE;  MY CORNER OF THE WORLD;  WILD BIRD Wednesday;  SIGNS SIGNS;  THANKFUL THURSDAY;  SKYWATCH FRIDAY;  FRIDAY  BLISS;  SATURDAY CRITTERS;  and RATHER B' BIRDING