Greetings.  I have not written here this year and wonder who is paying attention to the posts.

We’re currently camped near Lake Buena Vista close to Disney World and also the City of Orlando.  We are finishing our forth and final week in Florida this spring.  

Florida is warm in May and the shower season began early this year.  Still, we have enjoyed our stay and found most of the birds we had hoped to see here.  The excuse for this voyage was to find for the first time the Antillean Nighthawk.  We did and watched the bird soaring above Big Pine Key and giving its diagnostic peeta-peet call.  Good luck gave us the opportunity to see and hear singing a Bahama Mockingbird that somehow found its way across the Straights of Florida to Key Largo during our stay there.  So, we added two life-birds to our list this spring.

We packed our canoe and have paddled once each week.  This morning we went up and down Shingle Creek near here.  It is billed as the headwaters of the Everglades.  That is a stretch, but the stream ends at a lake that drains to another stream that flows into Lake Kissimmee.  The Kissimmee River flows from that lake and into Lake Okeechobee farther south.  Overflows from this lake (once) poured into the broad basin that supports the sawgrass prairie that is called the Everglades.  The river of grass flows south into Florida Bay at the southern tip of the Florida peninsula.  So, in a sense these are the headwaters of the glades even if Lake Okeechobee is now surrounded by a levee and is drained mostly through the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucy Canals.  Some water continues to be pumped from Okeechobee into the Everglades.

We have seen several birds, the Antillean Nighthawk, Black-whiskered Vireo, Cuban Yellow Warbler, Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, Mangrove Cuckoo, and Everglades Snail Kite that are difficult or impossible to see in Florida during the winter season.  So, we accommodate to the warmth, showers, and biting insects to find them.  

We also get to see our shadows almost vanish at Noon.  

The hurricane last fall significantly altered the vegetation in the Keys and the southern Everglades.  It also demolished a significant number of homes in the Middle Keys.  When young  I expressed interest in buying land in the Keys and my Dad warned me that one cannot build anything of value in the Keys because it will be destroyed by storms.  Property could not be insured there.  I decided that land in the Keys was best left alone.  Today, there are billions of dollars of development in the Keys.  The government now subsidizes insurance for the islands and so has encouraged building in this place where no wise man would invest.

Recent decades were kind to the Keys, but a hurricane swept across them last fall.  It was unpleasant to see blown out houses.    I last saw such damage there in 1960 after a bad storm in that year.  After so many quiet years people forget how violent the weather can be in south Florida.

Today there is more “wild Florida" in the middle of the state than in the south.  Of course, I know where to find it.  Two days ago we encountered state biologists working in a prairie that extended unbroken as far as the eye could see.  One of them commented that the work had its drawbacks but the view was fabulous.

Here near Orlando the traffic is awful even in May, but once out of town there are wonderful places to walk and paddle.  Two days ago I looked out into a marsh and suggested that Anne play a recording of the call of the King Rail.  She put the speaker on the path and we stood back and turned on the song.  A few minutes later a King Rail emerged from the marsh and walked out to the speaker and looked at it before continuing across the trail and into the marsh on the other side.  Wow!  Did I mention that seeing this bird is well nigh impossible?

We turned off the speaker and listened to several birds in the surrounding marsh continue the chorus of chugging.  They were then invisible in the grass.  

All good.

We spend a week along the Caloosahatchee River east of Fort Myers, a week on Key Largo, a week on Big Pine Key, and now a week here.  We’re heading home through the southern Appalachians for an early June visit to home before joining others on Saranac Lake.  

Best to all.