68 degrees, overcast, and calm
What is supposed to be a sunny warm day has not begun that way. So far, it is another is a series of dreary humid and cool mornings on which to hold our weekly walks through the Indian River Lagoon Preserve. A good crowd showed up this morning with over 20 folks interested in seeing what the park has to offer this morning. It is surprising that out of all of these people, none are repeaters. Will we have anything new to offer them today?
Our leader Don and I split the group into two to allow for more access to the scopes down at the water’s edge. My group spent the first 45 minutes checking out the river and was excited to find a dolphin feeding not far from the dock. As he works the water, he is followed by a group of three Brown pelicans waiting to see what the big guy stirs up. When the dolphin disappears, we have only to watch the pelicans and see where they fly. When the land, you can be sure that the dolphin will soon surface.
At one point, a Royal tern flew in to join the buffet. As he dove down and plucked a nice fish out of the lagoon, one of the pelicans flew at him, forcing the tern to drop its prey. The hapless tern flew away with nothing to show for its labor.
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| Royal tern |
When we switched areas, Don’s group moving down to the water and we to the wooded section of the park, we were greeted by a Great blue heron leisurely walking down the concrete walkway. The bird simply seemed ridiculously out of place as it wandered across our path, paying little heed to our presence. What seemed like a hundred Yellow-rumped warblers flitted from oak to oak. They rarely stayed in one spot long enough for any of us to get a really decent look at the birds, but there was an occasional “butter-butt” who tarried for enough time to let us get the binoculars on it. At the end of our 2 hour walk, we had rung up 34 species, but the most memorable sightings of the day had to be the dolphin-pelican show and the wandering heron.
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