One of my favorite days on this trip to Florida was the one we spent at Fort De Soto Park in Tierra Verde. It is a beautiful county park straddled between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico that is abundant in wildlife, walking trails and beaches full of shells and sand dollars.
This pier was closed at a point for the public to walk on, due to storm damage, but that didn’t stop a crowd of cormorants, and a few terns from gathering.
While walking back on the pier toward the land, I spotted movement of birds at the top of the trees. I got to see and photograph a new-to-me bird, a nanday parakeet.
This next one is a super-tightly cropped shot at 400mm, but I thought the lens did a decent job with it:
The trails in the park are a nice place to walk and get a little exercise while exploring – and exploring got me my first Florida geocache. This was just slightly off the beaten path, but hard to miss once you were in the right spot!
The trails were also loaded with these little guys, fiddler crabs.
The adults of these are only an inch or two in width. I wish I’d thought to put something in the photo for scale. As we were walking we noticed all these small holes with balls of dirt on top, wondering what they were. We found a sign explaining and then it was hard not to see them as they scurried into their holes to hide from our footsteps.
Back out by the water at the park, I discovered and photographed another new-to-me bird, the reddish heron.
Not very creatively named, is it?
Pterodactyls, uh, I mean pelicans, were also soaring in the sky, a fairly common sight in Florida.
They really do look like dinosaurs, don’t they?
This great egret seemed to be posing for a portrait:
At the end of Sand Dollar Key, you can look at Fort De Soto passage, a waterway that passes between the park and Shell Key. You can take a ferry ride to Shell Key and collect many beauties or just enjoy quiet nature. This grouping of birds at this tip of the park contains quite a variety of gulls and turns, among them another bird for my life list, a black skimmer.
Walking along this stretch of beach, yet another new-to-me creature appeared, a brittle star:
With a bit of research, I discovered these critters have been on this planet for 480 million years! Talk about dinosaurs!
After this delightful visit, we had a delicious late lunch at Billy’s Stone Crab. I had grouper tacos – the grouper was fresh and perfectly prepared. A fun little side note about this spot, if you remember the John Candy movie from the 80’s, Summer Rental, the scenes in Sculley’s were filmed in this restaurant!
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