Wild about Wildlife

In six months on the road we have seen an unfair amount of wildlife. The expression ‘we’ve seen our fair share’ is a dumb expression. Who wants things to be fair!? We have been utterly spoiled in the abundance of animals we have seen. Recently, we started a running list and we now have 67 different creatures on our list and that is just the stuff we can actually put a name to. Many of these animals bring a story along with them simply because seeing them in the wild in their natural environment is unforgettable. It’s enough to bring perfect strangers together.

For our six month mark I thought I’d jot down some of those memories, in no particular order. So grab your fish food, your binoculars, your Audubon field guides and your Big Year checklists. Here goes:

In Custer State Park in northwestern South Dakota we were stopped on a park road by a herd of bison. They clogged the road and were licking the sides of vehicles. The kids had their heads out the sunroof (not the windows, the beasts were so close it was somewhat frightening). We could smell their musky, damp-grass-like odor and look closely at their ragged hides. We all had huge expressions of disbelief on our faces. Earlier, I had said I would pay a dollar to whoever saw a buffalo. Thankfully, my kids didn’t stick me to it, or I’d probably be out $40.

On Cumberland Island in Georgia we saw our first armadillo and by the second day we’d seen so many they were almost commonplace. We startled the first one we saw and it bounded up in huge leaps and disappeared into the palmettos making a racket as it did so. Eventually we were able to approach one closely and were fascinated by its strange appendages and by its diligent rooting in the forest floor.

On Assateague Island we were approached by wild horses and were alarmed when they continued to walk toward us. Park rangers had told us to be wary and keep our distance as they had been known to trample visitors and bite. They also told us that the horses recognize food packaging from the nearby restaurant. You’ll see in the picture that Sienna has a fountain drink cup in her water bottle cage. We stood our ground uneasily and thankfully they veered off and continued past.

Wendy ran over a black racer snake on a mountain biking trail in the Santos trails area near Ocala, FL.

I almost ran over a large rattlesnake in Jonathan Dickinson state park and then watched as it slowly traveled from the trash cans to the bushes with its head up and its rattle shaking as it moved.

At the Ernest Coe visitor center in the Everglades a woman approached us and asked if we’d like to see a butterfly that the rangers thought were extinct. She took us a short distance to a plant that had a red chrysalis on it and then pointed out the black butterfly. There it was happily flapping away nearby. Who knows if she was relaying the correct information, but the idea that we were seeing something rare was enough for there to be a little spark of excitement between us.

Brevard, NC is full of white squirrels and when you look out a window and see one for the first time on a field of green grass the contrast is startling. They like to leap and bound. Supposedly, you don’t see white squirrels anywhere else in the world.

I saw two black bears cross a road in front of me while biking in the Pisgah National Forest and felt so special I wanted to whoop and holler. My heartbeat was thumping in my chest. After we started moving again I raised a clenched fist in excitement to the car behind me.

The Saga of Murray. Ava rescued a butterfly on Stafford beach on Cumberland Island and brought it back to our campsite. She named it Murray (she pronounced it ‘Muir-ray’) He wouldn’t fly and seemed to have a bum leg. She made it a little nook inside a shell with Spanish moss, little flower petals and some sand. She checked on him throughout the evening and tried to get him to eat the flowers. In the morning he was dead and she was really sad. She spent a half hour making him a resting place off the trail near our camp using twigs and grass and different colored sand to mark his grave. We said a few words over him before we packed off back to the ferry. For some reason or another her devotion to this little butterfly was so acute that it affected us all.

When we parked our camper at our site on Hunting Island in South Carolina there was a family of raccoons watching from the palm tree behind us, their little masked faces intent on our work.

Ava and Sienna noticed a crow struggling in a palm tree in Jetty Park. It was trying to fly free from a branch but couldn’t seem to lift off. It was tangled somehow. They really wanted to help it but that would have required a ladder and tools and going to camp to get those things and returning here to scale up into a tree near a park with people around. Just let nature have its way. Come on, Dad! Ok, fine! So we went to camp and returned at dusk with our telescoping ladder, gloves, scissors, safety glasses and a headlamp. I scaled up into the tree causing a scene already. Honey, what is that man doing? The next few moments, however, were remarkable. I managed to cut the branch that the crow was tangled on and carry the branch down the ladder with the bird flapping away in concern. Sienna filmed it all. I then held the crow snug in my gloved hands while Wendy attacked the twine that was terribly tangled in the poor creatures talons. There were a few people watching now and who knows, maybe we made it onto someone’s feed. We freed the bird and he hopped away a short distance. A cat slunk out of the shadows and worried us for a moment until finally our crow flew off. We cheered and headed back to camp all talking at the same time about our adventure.

In Key West we paddled kayaks over sharks three and half feet long in crystal clear water four feet deep and held our breaths. In the mangroves next to us huge iguanas sat perched precariously on branches high above our heads.

On Mt. Dessert Island in Acadia, on the cross island shuttle bus, the driver stopped in a trailhead parking lot and pointed out a porcupine in the bushes to us.

Ava picked up a large toad in Darien Lakes, NY and the picture of her surprised, excited and proud face, with the toad’s little feet poised on her fingers, is one of our favorites.

At Markham Park in Sunrise, FL I watched a 2’ green iguana cross the trail in front of me, its body way up high off the ground and its tail a barber pole of green and black stripes. He waited, frozen, on the side of the trail for me to move by.

On Tuckernuck Island off Nantucket we finally saw a live horseshoe crab in the shallows of a small shoal off shore that we had kayaked to. It burrowed in the sand and caused little puffs of sand to appear in its wake. You find so many dead ones that to find a live one felt like a small victory.

We watched flocks of small plovers scurry along the edge of waves on the sand in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. They would dart in after a receding wave and root for stuff in the sand. As the next wave approached they would scurry out of the way, their little legs a blur of motion. We could have watched them do that all day long.

Ava caught geckos and Florida scrub lizards in her hands and held them out for us to observe. We could see their individual legs and toes in great detail.

At the Flamingo marina in the Everglades we saw our first manatees. The girls climbed down a small ladder and leaned over the water to touch their barnacle-laden skin. There was a small baby that kept playfully climbing on to the bigger one’s back and then sinking out of sight. Their large paddle-like tails would break the surface. There is nothing remarkable about a manatee (this statement will naturally cause some gasps of derision). It is grayish-brownish in color, it wallows in the water with seemingly no dexterity, its natural curiosity about humans probably makes it ridiculously easy to hunt, but boy is it a neat thing to see. Maybe it’s its uniqueness or its unusualness or its fragility and its gentleness, and therefore its apparent happiness. Scars were evident all over their backs making us sad that their calmness – a reason why people can swim with them – is also the reason why they often get struck by boat propellors.

We watched scallops swim in Nantucket. Have you ever seen a scallop swim? How bizarre.

On Callawassie Island in SC we observed alligators on the banks of the small ponds scattered around the golf course. There weren’t as many as you might see in warmer weather. ‘Big Al’ – the locally admired 14’ gator that everyone seems to talk about (‘did you see Big Al over on the 14th hole today! Man, is he a big ‘un) – did not make an appearance.

At a campground in Raleigh, NC we saw dozens of millipedes on the walkways near the bathroom in the evenings. Some of them were 3” long. They curl up if you touch them and then ever so slowly uncurl to continue their slog to who-knows-where.

In the Great Smoky Mountains we picked up some stink bugs and now, two months later, we are still finding them in the camper.

At Jupiter Inlet in Jupiter, FL we caught a fleeting glimpse of a big sea turtle in the blue water of the inlet as the tide was coming in. Look, there! And then it was gone.

At the terminus of the Snake Bight trail (‘bight’ meaning bay, not a misspelling of ‘bite’) in the Everglades we viewed sawfish fins in the water. We had run the entire 2 miles out to the boardwalk at the end of the trail because the mosquitos were so bad. (And yes, we ran all the way back). Standing on the boardwalk looking for the roseate spoonbill through the binoculars Wendy exclaimed, ‘Oh, a dolphin! Wait, no, that’s not a dolphin!’ We then fought over the one pair of binos between us to see the fins slicing through the water. We thought it was a shark but there were three fins. Later we discovered they were sawfish. They were trapped by low tide in the pool before us and calmly and slowly swam back and forth only feet from the masses of pelicans, and spoonbills and ibis fishing near them. They are an endangered species and fairly bizarre in form. They look like sharks but are related to rays.

On Cumberland Island at the Dungeness ruins – an old haunt of the Carnegies – Wendy found a huge pileated woodpecker on a cabbage palm tree. It seemed to keep moving behind the trunk as we walked around the tree trying to see it. It’s large red ‘hat’ striking in comparison to its white and black plumage. They are large birds!

On the side of a trail at Jonathan Dickinson state park we saw a gopher tortoise. Its ungainly motions as it walked off into the palmettos made us wonder how such a creature survives at all. We learned that Trapper Nelson enjoyed gopher tortoise soup.

Sadly, at Jetty Park, on Thanksgiving of all days, we saw a dead osprey on the ground that had died when it struck a power line. Its wings were fully outstretched on the ground. It was easily 4’ from wingtip to wingtip. We got a close up in the Everglades of an osprey nest – a giant conglomeration of sticks and Spanish moss the size of a bathtub.

Herons have been the animal we have probably seen the most variety of. So far we have seen great blues, greens, white morphs, nights and tricolors. They are the best hunters and silent stalkers we have seen.

On the outside bathhouse wall at the Flamingo campground in the Everglades there was a 4” long two-stripe walking stick. It has either a female or a baby on its back. I stumped both the naturalist and a park ranger when I showed them a picture. The park ranger in the visitor center came out of the building as we approached our car in the parking lot and shouted across the distance to us. Teagan had just received her Junior Ranger badge. He yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth, ‘JUNIOR RANGER!?’. ‘YEAH,’ we yelled back. ‘I FOUND YOUR BUG. IT’S A TWO-STRIPE WALKING STICK!’. ‘THANKS’, we yelled back. He gave us two thumbs up and then disappeared back into the visitor center.

We’ve also seen jellyfish floating in the bow waves of ferry boats. We saw our first dol…just now a huge crow has landed in front of me in the grass and has hopped up onto the fire ring grate and is looking at me and tilting his head in that strange way they do. Now he is up on the pile of firewood. Could be a raven? He’s so close I can see the whites of his eyes when he blinks or perhaps it’s the eyelid that is white or maybe just the light reflecting off his eyes as he moves his head. I don’t know. Poof, like that he’s gone. As I was saying, we saw our first dolphin in Maryland in Assateague. We’ve seen eagles and manta rays and white-tailed deer, bats and ducks, needlefish, tarpon and snook. We saw American crocodiles in the Everglades on a boat tour in the backcountry to Whitewater Bay. We’ve seen parrots and scrub jays, vultures, ibis, egrets, kingfishers, anhingas, sandpipers, pelicans, swan, geese, wood storks, downy woodpeckers, warblers and common gulls and plenty of songbirds that I can’t name. The girls have played with hermit crabs and snails and dug for clams. We’ve seen wolf spiders, garden spiders, orb weavers and tarantulas (live ones in a museum, thankfully!). The mosquito meter in the visitor center in the Everglades was pointing to the ‘horrible’ section, so we saw plenty of those. We’ve seen cockroaches, centipedes, stick bugs, caterpillars, butterflies, deer flies, sand flies, ticks, gnats, noseeums, chiggers, bees, dragonflies, dung beetles and slugs.

And all that without visiting a single zoo or aquarium yet on the trip.

What a wonderful world of wildlife there is out there.