Orlando Wetlands Park, 14th February 2017

February 14, 2017

I flew into Orlando on Monday to visit my sister in law Anne as we are going to Chicago together.Yesterday we spent most of the day in Orlando Wetlands Park, an area of swamp and lake that has been created by the City of Orlando as part of their wastewater treatment plan. It is an area very rich in birds and reptiles and I took a large number of pictures which I will group below. The day was cloudy to start with but then grew quite hot, especially for me.

Starting with the general landscape, the swamp cypress trees have widened trunks like the mangrove.

Then onto the birds we saw.

Here in order is the glossy ibis, the wood stork and the female grackle, a bird a little larger than a blackbird. The wood storks were hanging out by some trees

which were overlooked by a mound, presumably built or that reason. Anne was standing at the base of the mound so I also took a picture of her.

Florida teems with turkey vultures and they were abundant in the park. We also saw a Cooper's hawk, which was a distance away in a tree and really tested the limit of my camera/lens combination.

Back to the water birds. We saw tri-coloured heron and the great grey heron. Also cattle egret and a rather shy limpkin, a large heron like bird.

A favourite Florida bird of mine is the anhinga, a cormorant like bird, only smaller and slimmer. The female is brown but the male is black and white and its eye turns a beautiful emerald colour in the mating season. We found a couple of males drying out and a female who had speared a fish but was having great problems getting it off her bill to eat it.

But of course the most exciting animals were the alligators. And we must have seen around 2 dozen on our walk. I will show them in order of size from tiny babies to hulks we kept well clear of. They were mainly sleeping, hauled out on the side of the water. Although they occasionally could be seen swimming across the surface of the lake.

Other reptiles we saw were the soft shelled alligator turtle ( I dread to think why it has that name) and a gopher tortoise which was living by the entrance to the park. The gopher tortoise burrows in the ground and the one had a burrow 15ft long and 6ft down. It came out for a while and then tidied up the entrance to it's burrow by flinging out sand.