Felts Audubon Preserve, Palmetto

We spent a few days last week grown-up camping in  the Palmetto-Bradenton area.  (We slept in our own bed in the Road-trek camper van and let other people cook dinner for us. )

Felts Audubon Preserve is in Palmetto.   Other Audubon Preserves we've visited have an Information Center and well-marked trails, boardwalks and so forth.  And they always have great birding opportunities.   This one definitely had the birds, but it was also less developed.  That was OK though because it was also far less crowded than we've come to expect during the "high season" in Florida.

 

 

Bill looking for the lost trail

We started off on a dirt trail along a creek where we saw a few nice turtles and some butterflies, but then the trail suddenly ended.  It had been a long time since we'd enjoyed bushwhacking our way on a hike.   (I'm not kidding about enjoying — we did used to like that when we were younger,  but un-improved areas in the Pacific Northwest are quite different from here in Florida.)  

 

 

This vine was entangled in overgrowth all along that non-trail .  I don't know my wildflower IDs at all, but I can tell you that this one smelled wonderful.      In the interest of complete honesty and to show that we're not completely crazy, we did turn around shortly after I took that bushwhacking picture and retraced our way along the turtle trail.  

Back in civilization, we spotted female and male cardinals.  Always favorites  –  these guys don't live in the Pacific Northwest, so we never saw them until we traveled south in our RV years.   They aren't exactly common for me yet, in that we don't see them around where we live here in SW Florida, but we do most times we go to a birding spot.  I never get tired of seeing them.

Then we found the trail to the birding blind which we'd read that Felts Preserve had. And I was a happy birder:

 

Painted Bunting

 

 I am grateful to the Audubon people here at Felts for keeping the bird feeders filled so that we could see and photograph these gorgeous birds.  It would be fun to spot a painted bunting on its own without the help of feeders, but we've never been in the right place at the right time.   Seeing them here was great enough!  

 

 

It's a good thing we were there when we were because according to the Audubon Society's website, painted buntings  start to migrate North again in March.   

 

Here's a closer view of the little blue bird that was sharing the feeder bounty.  I would have thought it was a female bunting, but all my books  show her as a greenish bird.  There was nobody else at the bird blind but  us — which was good in most ways, except I could have used an expert volunteer.  

 

SunRise on the Canal

 This is a closer-to-home picture — but it is from February a year ago.  We're looking EAST early in the morning, standing at the dock at the end of our block.   That dock was destroyed during Ian, but the park is in the process of rebuilding it.  (You can still stand at the end of the street and look across the Canal, but to watch the sun rise you have to get up earlier than I've been doing this year.  Not the Hurricane's fault!)

 

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