From Upper Central Florida / 2014 April 21

Hello, Everybody,

In the past few weeks I've visited three of the most-recommended birding
sites in central Florida, with some great photographic opportunities.

At Viera Wetlands, in addition to 'the usual' sightings of Herons and
Egrets, I was lucky enough to find a pair of Sandhill Cranes with two
tiny chicks, just a few days old. I've sometimes seen online 
photographers' images of these and hoped someday to have a chance -- I'm
beginning to realize that the great images from 'the pros' are not only
the result of great equipment and technique, but of being where the
birds are. The Florida Sandhill Cranes are non-migratory, which I think
probably contributes to them being extraordinarily tame -- I've seen
them doing their mating dances on the highway shoulder and in people's
yards, something you would never see in the west. Another treat was
pretty tame otter -- four feet long not counting the bare tail, and
energetically squirming around on the path for a sand bath.

Merritt Island NWR is huge, with vast areas of shallow/brushy wetlands,
and good access from several back roads. Their 6 mile paved one-way
nature drive was completely unproductive; I learned later that a shift
in the water balance there had moved all the usual birds elsewhere. A
volunteer at the Visitor Center told me of an out-of-the way area where
she had seen many Roseate Spoonbills just a few days earlier, and as
this was my 'target bird' I drove there to find several dozen Spoonbills
too far away for good pictures, but I did get a few other miscellaneous
pictures. There was a Reddish Egret charging drunkenly around in circles
with wings up to shade the water for visibility (these birds are pretty
smart!), quite characteristic of that species. I decided to return the
next day and try my little pontoon boat go get close to them; but the
next day they were not there! And I began to realize that it was
probably too shallow even for the pontoon boat. As I was leaving the
area, I was elated to see a huge flock of Spoonbills, Egrets, and
Pelicans fly in and land quite near the little road I was on. They
started taking off and flying nearly overhead one-at-a-time, giving me
great chances at catching them in flight. At the peak of breeding
season, the Spoonbills get an almost unbelievably brilliant crimson red,
which looks great with their more muted pink. I was pretty pleased with
how my images were coming out -- in several, you can see little drops of
water left in the air behind their feet. After they had mostly left, I
drove on, to find a very strange sight: a Great Blue Heron standing near
the road with its wings drooping open, something I've never seen a Heron
do before. It was also panting, which made me wonder if it might be
seriously sick. The background at MINWR are the buildings and towers of
Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center; they fired off a big booster
while I was birding there, but I had confused the right direction to
look for it and the correct direction was behind bushes (this in spite
of several GPS and mapping programs), so to my chagrin all I heard was a
big roar and saw nothing.

I'd been seeing some great images on the internet taken in recent days
at Gatorland, a Disney-like theme park with thousands of alligators,
zip-lines overhead, crowds, and a great rookery where it is possible to
get only a few feet away from the nesting birds. I saw several cases of
Egret chick 'bill grabbing', which I've read is to stimulate the parent
to regurgitate food for the chick -- but some of the chick bill-
grabbing its sibling chick looked maybe more like bullying sibling
rivalry .

Remember, these large files may take several minutes to download; The
files are now on a commercial hosting server with very fast internet
connection, which will speed things up for those of you who have a fast
download connection. There has been a myriad of opportunities for
typographic errors in putting up all the older slideshows; please let me
know if you run into any problems.

The server address is:     http://john-armitage.com

The new slideshow (at the top of the list) is: 14_04_Apr_FL.exe

If you can easily change your screen brightness, you might optimise it
for the best viewing.

NEW: For Mac users there is a .zip file to download, and here is how to
use it (please let me know if you have any problems):

go to    http://john.qued.com/   and click on the blue line for a list
of slideshows

click on a zip file for a slideshow

after downloading, open the zip file

open the extracted folder which will be in the same folder and have the
same name as the zip file (likely in Downloads)

select all of the jpg files, using Cmd+A (select with this method only,
to keep them in order)

use the space-bar for a Quick View slideshow

use the spread arrows in the upper right corner for full screen

don't click the menu bar, it will disappear

use the right and left arrow keys to navigate

use Escape to exit full screen

optional: delete the zip and/or extracted folder

Boilerplate follows: Each browser is a little different, but generally
you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK
and then OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future
re-viewing.

Right-Arrow or Right-Click or SpaceBar will advance to the next picture.
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture. Esc will
end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems stuck.

If you would like any of the individual images, perhaps to print, just
let me know. If you don't want to get any more emails like this one in
the future, please let me know. If you have friends who might be
interested, I'll be happy to add them to my email list and they can
download the slideshows if they have a broadband internet connection.
None of this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the
pictures, the better.

Regards, John Armitage 1-970-250-6080 john@qued.com