I live on the north side of downtown St. Petersburg and about three miles north east of where I'm sitting is a little sliver of wilderness called Weedon Island State Preserve . Here it is from the air.
Weedon Island is a pristine slice of old Florida and the preserve itself starts out in the turtle grass beds of the Bay. It includes a healthy stand of mangroves and continues inland through pine scrubland, grassy savanna and hardwood hammock. What this means is that you get a good view of an entire coastal ecosystem and the creatures of Weedon Island have enough room to be themselves.
Weedon Island has been a beacon to human beings for thousands of years and the evidence of those early habitations keep a team of archeologists working overtime. The earliest inhabitants of Weedon Island lived and fished there from 500 BCE onward. Conquistadors came through Weedon Island when this was an outpost of Spain and it was actually Ponce de Leon who mapped Tampa Bay. Pirates are said to have buried treasure there and in the early part of the 20th century, some dreamer started a movie studio there in the hopes of luring the fledgling film industry away from New York. That industry ended up in some town, I can never remember the name of it, in California instead.
Weedon's hardly untouched with the aid of human hands however in a place as built up as this is, it's a completely welcome respite in addition to but every other reminded how tied to the Gulf of Mexico everything round here is.
Well as luck would have it, my great pal Melody McFarland and her husband Gene are in town this weekend and we're going on an adventure tomorrow morning. Melody's a biologist who's never kayaked through a mangrove swamp before. I cannot wait to count birds, bugs, fish, snakes and mammals (marine and otherwise) with her. Besides, I need a break so badly I can't stand it.
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| Canoe path through the mangroves |
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| Cownose rays training round a mangrove island. |
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| Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in the Bay. Yes, they genuinely do jump out of the water like this. |
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| No experience to the Florida wilds might be whole with a sighting or of Nephila clavipes, the yellow silk spider. Truly my favored Florida creature and that scale isn't always a Photoshop trick. |
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| If I needed to choose a favorite bird, the roseate spoonbill would come close to the pinnacle of my listing. Few matters in life prepare you for the joys of seeing a purple chicken. |
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| More canoe path surroundings |
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| Tampa Bay is one of the few locations in North America with a breeding populace of white pelicans. If we are lucky we will see them. |
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| Yellow-crested night herons are pretty not unusual in these parts but they're still fascinating. |
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| Snowy egrets are quite common too, however they may be in breeding plumage at the moment of year and that they appearance otherworldly whilst they are tricked out in it. |
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| And no ride into the Florida wilds is entire without strolling into a couple of those men. Despite their endangered reputation, there's pretty a population of these men in Tampa Bay. |
I love things biological nearly as a great deal as I like layout-y stuff and I am a fortunate guy certainly to have such proper friends as Melody and Gene.