Killing time

Geoff has been writing a corporate history for a company headquartered in Versailles, Ohio. He has been visiting there off and on gathering interviews with past and present employees, and this time we all went along for the ride.
Versailles, Ohio (that's "ver-sails", not "Vair-sigh") is a quiet and tiny town on the western edge of the state. One hotel, one gas station, no Starbucks....you get the picture. Geoff talked me into the trip by telling me all about the "nature places" and his non-birding opinion that the place would be "birdy".

We arrived in the early morning on Monday and as Geoff headed off to do his job, the girls and I headed to a nearby reserve to kill time.


Stillwater Prairie Reserve:

It's 380 acres of prairie loveliness. Full of native Ohio wildflowers, it's a butterfly and dragonfly heaven. With two ponds and a wetland, it's a frog and bird paradise.
Let's go to the photos:


Milkweed was everywhere. More than I have ever seen in one place. Common, swamp, spider milkweed...all full of juicy milk and crawling with milkweed bugs and beetles. And earwigs. And other things I couldn't identify.






Dragonflies and damselflies were everywhere. Pond hawks, widow skimmers, Carolina saddlebags, halloween pennants.





Butterflies were everywhere. Monarchs too busy to land and pose, tiger swallowtails, small sulphurs, tiny blues, clouds of cabbage whites, and this red-spotted purple.


Two ponds in the reserve gave Isabelle many chances to catch frogs (one of her favorite past times).
This peeper landed on Lorelei's shirt, and tried to escape through the "portal."



I was in Native Paradise.
Yellow coneflower, purple coneflower, bee balm as far as the eye can see....adding that to the copious amounts of milkweed, and it was all I could do NOT to strip down and roll through it all naked.



Bird-wise, it was quiet, as expected in mid-summer.
But this kingbird was close enough for the girls to hear its beak "snap" as it zoomed back and forth from its branch to flycatch.



Non-sequiter:
We left the prairie to get some lunch (and returned back TO the prairie after eating) and while driving through the next town, Isabelle say this sign on the post office and MADE ME take a photo:


"Mommy....it's a Puh-Just Office!" (giggles ensue)

Stranded in the Everglades

The last Florida post.

On Saturday, we headed out of town and deep into the flat, swampy loveliness that is the Florida Everglades. We wanted alligators, anhingas and snail kites (well, I wanted snail kites). And we wanted to ride on an airboat.
An air boat is just a shallow (knee-high depth) boat that is run by a very small outboard motor and one or two very big fans. Hence the name air boat.
We were assured that safety records for air boats are very very good.

It started out well. The girls were wearing life jackets and it seemed that the thunderstorm we skirted on the way in was going to hold off.
Half-way into the ride, we made a scheduled stop near a swamp apple tree. We learned that swamp apples were poisonous 5 months out of the year, and the guide wouldn't tell us which 5 months that was. Lesson: DON'T eat swamp apples.
We learned about saw grass. He pulled a stem from a nearby plant and passed it around. Yes, it is shaped like a saw. If you handle it the wrong way, it will slice you. Lesson: DON'T handle it the wrong way.
Please click on the photo to see the little barbs along the stem. They are really, really sharp.




What it feels like to skim above water and grass in an air boat:







Thunder. Very very close to the boat. And the rain began.





So the driver (captain, whatever) said for everyone to hang on so we could get out of there.
Sputter......
Choke, choke...
Sputter....
We all started looking around at each other. Isn't the engine supposed to start when you turn the key?
He stuck his head down into the boat and told us that we had lost the right engine (thank goodness we weren't on a damn plane) and he was calling in an SOS for a rescue boat.
Holy cow.

It was a tense 10 minutes. We were in the middle of the freakin' Everglades. In a big metal boat. With an intense thunderstorm over us.
A boat came along (not our rescue...just some more tourists) and we had a nice, pleasant moment chatting with the folks. You know they were thinking, "Glad that isn't US!".


Soon enough, a rescue boat came to get us. We then had to transfer out of the disabled boat and into the new one, which scared the crap out of me. What if one of the girls had fallen in? With freakin' ALLIGATORS everywhere? There could have been one under the boat the whole time.
We got the rescue boat going and finishing our tour in one piece.
The captain said, "Well, at least you all can go home and tell people that you were actually stranded in the Everglades."
Yeah. Thanks, Gilligan.

Some of my lifers from Florida (in a cute little slideshow)

Where to get the best damn ice cream in the world

We used a travel agent for our trip (Julie Sturgeon is her name,and I highly recommend her!) and since she herself has vacationed in the same area, she was hip to the local vibe.

In addition to finding us cheap airfare, a great hotel right on the beach, and generally being a great person, she also sent a personal letter listing all the "local" stuff to do...where to buy our groceries cheap (The Publix on one street was three times as expensive as the Publix on another street...Thanks, Julie!), nice parks for the kids, and also a Dania Beach staple since 1956:
Jaxson's Ice Cream Parlor.

This place was just a little hole in the wall, but they serve ice cream they make fresh right on the premises...and they serve it in UNHOLY AMOUNTS.



Geoff got some kind of sundae with about 5 cups of butterscotch on it.

The girls thought they had died and gone to Heaven:
Isabelle got a simple hot fudge sundae....but it was almost as tall as she was:

I think that face says it all.

(Lorelei got a single scoop of vanilla...no pictures of that. Boring.)
: ^ )
I'm a fan of chocolate and mint, so I ordered a chocolate mint parfait, and I haven't been seen since:

Jesus, Mary and Joseph...it was so delicious. And I was only able to force down about half of it.

We consumed more calories in that 30 minutes than some families consume in a whole day.

God bless America.

The life list is growing (and a few non-bird species of Florida)

If I added correctly, my life birds in Florida came to 13. That makes my life list 199! One more and I can get one of those "200" pins!

My life birds from the trip:

Common Peafowl (Countable in Florida! Woo Hoo!)
Muscovy Duck (domestic) (Poop. Not countable.)
Brown Pelican
Anhinga
Snowy Egret
Little Blue Heron
Tricolored Heron
Cattle Egret
Common Moorhen
Laughing Gull
Eurasian Collared Dove
Monk Parakeet
Loggerhead Shrike
Boat-Tailed Grackle

Florida isn't just about birds and beaches. We saw so many lizards, crabs, butterflies...All different from what we can find here in the Northern reaches of Southwest Ohio:
The Anne Kolb Nature Center in Hollywood, Florida looked promising for birds, but you know what? I saw Zero birds there.
As we drove in, I saw a sign that gave us a preview of what we would see:

Land crabs? Cool!


I went back after a thunderstorm and there were hundreds (thousands?) of small, medium and large crabs scurrying everywhere. The small ones (about the size of a quarter) were covering the boardwalk and would scuttle out of the way as I stepped through. The big ones were in their dug-out mud holes and would disappear before my eyes as soon as I noticed them. It took a lot of finesse to get this picture. If you click on it, you will see that he is nibbling on that leaf!


The butterfly action was nice. I saw no butterfly there that I could immediately ID, which is so fun! This one is called a white peacock.
We also saw a great fritillary and this guy:

Zebra longwing.


We walked under this guy on the boardwalk:

A Spiny-backed orbweaver (Gasteracantha cancriformis) It looked like a colorful beer bottle cap from underneath. From what I have read, this is not a spider you have to worry about killing you or anything.

As far as I can tell, the lizards we saw running all over were Florida Scrub Lizards. I don't know from lizards...I'm a bird gal.
This one was found by the girls in the middle of the street at the Nature Center:

A baby, obviously. The other ones were about 6 to 8 inches long, and this guy measured in at a whopping 2 inches long. He hopped right up onto my hand, then jumped onto Isabelle, who thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to her.



Anyone wondering if we saw alligators?
Um, HELL YEAH. We saw alligators that were way too close to us.
We visited the Everglades on two different days (more on the first time in another post). Finishing a walk along one of the levees, we came to a boat ramp where some young guys (and one small girl about Lorelei's age) were fishing. 30 feet into the water was an alligator.
An eight-foot alligator:


The guys were at least smart enough to lead the little girl away, but they were not smart enough to leave themselves. We kept our distance, knowing full well that an alligator would consider
one of our children a nice meal. And that a full-grown alligator can run up to 35 miles an hour for short bursts. We retreated to higher ground to take pictures. The gator got to within 10 feet of the fishermen, looking very interested in what they were doing. I'm sure gators learn quickly that fishermen will toss out the guts as they dress a fish, so fishermen=free meals. But we were not going to allow our kids to be in any danger. We got in the car and later drove by to make sure there was no carnage. The fishermen's car was gone. Or maybe the gator ate them, then their car?
(A sobering stat: I read that of the last 20 alligator-related deaths in Florida, 10 of them were kids under the age of 13....that is plenty for me to have had an unbreakable grip on the kids)

Sand where the sun don't shine

Hello, all! We are back from Florida's Gold Coast!

I am still digging sand out of orifices I wasn't aware I had.
I fully expected to blog while we were down there, but the lap top was on vacation, too. I took it out of the suitcase and the monitor wouldn't light up. So it needs to go to the PC doctor.

Anyway, sand....
Lots and lots of sand:

The girls fell in love with the ocean (which was right outside our hotel...I mean, we stepped out onto the patio, went down one step and there was the beach. It was awesome.)
Isabelle and Lorelei spent nearly every waking hour in the water. Lorelei wouldn't go out too far, staying near the surf...and every wave deposited another cupful of sand into her bathing suit. I spent quite a lot of time rinsing suits out. My Mom states that when we went to Florida, back when I was about 4, I was carrying so much sand in my little bikini it looked like I had baked potatoes hidden in there. I guess what goes around, comes around?

My first lifer of the trip....brown pelicans:

I knew they were big, but man oh man...they are really big!

They didn't seem to care that 20 or 30 people were out in the water....they would fall out of the sky diving for fish 10 feet from us.


Another lifer (and countable!) was a flock of birds noodling around in the palm trees right outside the hotel:

Monk parakeets! I kept hearing what sounded like our parakeet here at home, and was pleasantly surprised to see a slew of green birds swooping in and out of the trees. (Green birds are hard to come by here in Ohio) Monk parakeets are an introduced species (from escapes and numb-nuts letting them go) but they have established themselves in Florida and I am glad they did.
Another exotic species that has found a niche in Florida...a bird we know well here in the Williams' household:


Eurasian collared doves. They were easily as numerous as the rock pigeons down there. It was neat to see a wild bird just like our beloved Euro. Another countable lifer.

Effortless birding is always a treat. While stopping for lunch before hitting the Everglades, we came across common moorhens and their babies:

The little ones were adorable, running across the floating vegetation like chickens. Another lifer.

I have about a hundred photos to get through, so I will leave you with not only another effortless bird, but also another lifer:

A white ibis, just stalking around a yard....in a neighborhood.

At last count, I had 11 lifers. But something that was lacking was the simple, easy songbirds. There weren't little birds just hanging out in the trees. I'm used to seeing chickadees and blue jays and sparrows out and about, but where we were, just shorebirds/sea birds/weird exotic birds.
More tomorrow!

What a girl wants, what a girl needs, whatever makes you happy sets you free

The Big Trip to Florida looms...and I wanted to list the things I hope I see:

1. Anhingas

(Shamelessly swiped from Kathi's blog)

2. Manatees

3. Brown pelicans

4. Dolphins

5. Florida Scrub Jays

(And I want one to sit on my hat....this pic also stolen from Kathi)

6. Really, any bird that you can only see in Florida

7. My husband relaxed for the first time in 8 years

8. My kids playing in the surf for the first time ever

9. ZERO clothes washers or dryers, dishwashers or phones.

10. A sunset over the ocean, holding my family close to me

11. My pretty, painted beach toes buried in the sand