Florida and the Birds of Florida

Just before Thanksgiving, we moved to Lake Worth in Southern Florida. Lake Worth is on the Atlantic side of Florida, just south of West Palm Beach, and north of Fort Lauderdale. We spent Thanksgiving with our son, Hap and his family. Shortly after that we took a short trip north to Inverness, Florida and visited my niece and my sister.
We have been quite busy seeing our family!

Our daughter Diana flew out from Las Vegas for a short visit; last week I flew to Virginia and visited by son, Tom and his family. Daughter Debbie is coming to visit us in February and perhaps her husband Stu will also accompany her. Son Tom may fly down to see us at the same time.

Our new RV makes it much easier to have company. There are two sofa beds, and they are comfortable. (In our former RV, the sofa bed was “unsleepable”, and we usually set up an air mattress on the floor, with a sleeping bag.) Also, as you might guess, with the greater length (40 feet vs. 37 feet), and more slide-outs (four vs. one in the former coach) we have a lot more room --- well, for those of you who live in a house, you might not think it is a lot of room, but we find it spacious – in fact the two of us seem to rattle around in here.

It is always nice to get to southern Florida when winter comes. The weather has been pretty nice; although there were a couple of rainy spells, but usually it has been warm and sunny most of each day. The weather in Southern Florida differs from that in the north. It is warmer, and probably a little wetter.

We are staying in a county park, John Prince Park. This park is quite large, and surrounds about two-thirds of Lake Osborne. Only a small part of the park is devoted for camping – mostly RV, but room for a limited amount of tents. There is a bicycle/walking trail around the lake, and if one wished, one could take a ten mile walk or bike ride. Since I lost my sense of balance, I no longer bike, but I do walk some. There are several species of palm trees in the park, as well as banyan trees and some type of pine trees. The fishing is pretty good, but I have not tried it this year. There are bass, catfish and tilapia. However, when I did fish, I only succeeded in catching bass on artificial lures. When I tried to use worms, I caught turtles, and believe me, that is not much fun!

There are lots of water fowl here. There is a small family of wood storks (3-4 birds). They are impressive, both because of their size, but also they are quite ugly, with bald red heads. From time to time there are pelicans. These are huge creatures, soaring over the lake looking for fish. When they see one, they go dive head first in a free fall of perhaps fifty feet. You would think they would hurt themselves, but they don’t seem to.

When daughter Diana was here she gave me a small guide to southern Florida water birds. While on a one hour walk yesterday I saw the following birds:

Great Egret
Glossy Ibis
Little Blue Heron
White Ibis
Anhinga
Common Moorhen
American Coot
Limpkin

My New Year’s resolution: I will try to update the blog each week. If nothing eventful happens, I will entertain with political commentary and colorful observations.