Heading to Florida for a week

[semillama]

Leaving Ohio at 5pm, arriving in Titusville about 6am and going to hit the ground birding!

I'm probably going to pick up about 15 life birds tomorrow. I'll post photos and tales when I get back. Meanwhile, keep the guessing game going!

[XemaSab]

1. Good luck!

And let me tell you... the Keys, Tortugas, and Sanibel were the best spots.

Don't go down Snake Bight! It's a mosquito infested hellhole with only a WIPL for our troubles! :o

[Gato Moteado]

2. did you go to flamingo?

and other parts of ENP or big cy?

[XemaSab]

3. I did go to Flamingo

Geez... that place looked like a bomb went off. :P

[Gato Moteado]

4. really? it used to be beautiful

what happened?

[semillama]

5. Hurricane Andrew is what happened!

It's not so bad now, but you can still see some areas that haven't come back from the storm.



This is the trail head for Snake Bight. We did go down it, and we also got a WIPL for our troubles as well as a Clapper Rail (but that was great by me, both were life birds). Skeeters weren't bad - but one of our group mentioned that the canopy over the trail wasn't as dense as it used to be, probably another result of hurricane Andrew, and that probably had an effect on the amount of bugs.

[XemaSab]

6. You made it down Snake BIght?

Dude... we went down there and got HAMMERED! The worst part about it is that there was some sort of dead bird under the boardwalk at the end of the trail, and I went down to check it out. My feet sunk in the mud a little, and they smelled like bad cheese the rest of the trip. x(

And yeah, Flamingo looks like Salton Sea east. It's clear something gnarly happened there. :(

[semillama]

8. Seriously!

We even went out and got mosquito head nets and I bought a long sleeve shirt (forgot to pack one). Sprayed on the bug dope and off we went. There were a fair number of mosquitos but the folks who had been there before all agreed that it was abnormally light compared to their other trips. I sort of feel like I missed out. I guess that's why we didn't get the flamingos - we didn't earn them!

Did get this nice photo of a pair of Red-shouldered Hawk nestlings on the way down the trail though.

[Gato Moteado]

7. i actually lived there during andrew

and believe me, there were just as many mosquitoes in flamingo before andrew as there were after. maybe more.

when you'd run to your car from the flamingo visitor center the mosquitoes would follow you in a big swarm and you couldn't open your car door and get in and close it fast enough to keep any of them out. usually about 100 would get into the car with you.

so they devised a thing called the flamingo flush where you would quickly start up your car and pull out of the parking spot and then open your car door and hold it open with your left foot and have your passenger do the same with the passenger side door. then you'd drive through the parking lot as fast as possible to flush out all the mosquitoes. of course you'd end up flushing anything else that was in the car too.