Scrub Jays, Manatees, & Mardi Gras

Spring arrived in Central Florida last Friday afternoon.  After twelve of them, I’ve grown wise to the signs….the sun’s out, the temperature’s up, and, suddenly, the air’s juicy.  Juicy—that’s the local word for “somebody’s going to get pounded by a thunderhead this afternoon.”

At the very least, the change in seasons meant that I wouldn’t have to load up on the layers when Gail and I headed off for what’s become an annual February nature day.  (Fact is, when it comes to hiking, there’s a rather small comfort window – we don’t want it cold and blustery, but with our sun, seventy degrees can be uncomfortably hot out in the scrublands.  We had a fairly ambitious agenda – a morning hike through the Lyonia Preserve – a fairly new habitat-reclamation project hosting its first Scrub Jay Festival, then, after lunch, a visit to Blue Springs State Park where, with luck, we’d be able to see some manatees.

Since last Saturday was the best Saturday we’ve had since, oh, November, the Scrub Jay Festival was successful beyond its organizers’ wildest dreams  Gail and I wondered if the crowds might scare the birds away.  We needn’t have worried: only a few of the attendees were actually interested in walking the full loop through the Preserve….and scrub jays…well, they’re not exactly shy.

So, this was the sort of terrain we walked through—sugar sand scrub…  I’ve been on any number of beaches where the sand isn’t as deep or slippery as what we were walking through, so even though the hills aren’t much to look at, you feel like you’re climbing a sand dune.  So, I was getting my exercise, and then some…and walking through a variety of ecosystems.  We’re the home of pocket ecosystems: take ten steps and you’ve gone from sugar sand to ice-age peat, or “climb” a three-foot-high hill and you’ve gone from scrub to pine forest.  And that’s not factoring in flood and fire.  It’s very changeable….and quite challenging to the folks charged with preserving a bit of “Old Florida” in the midst of rampant humanity.

But they’re doing a good job at Lyonia.  We weren’t far from the madding crowd when we spotted our first scrub jay…

and a second

or a third keeping an eye on things…

but it wasn’t until we stopped to shed a layer of jacket, that I got a picture of one in its native habitat…

He (or she) perched on my head first, which meant that I was prepared when he (or she…it’s almost impossible to tell with jays) flitted to an alternate perch.  At least it didn’t decide to dig for acorns and, when it left, it left of its own accord…’cause you know what happens when you scare a bird off its perch.

Anyway, we either saw about thirty scrub jays on our hike,(or we saw the same five or six birds several times).  They’re officially endangered, so I’d like to think that it was thirty.

We finished Lyonia around noon and headed over to Blue Springs.  Several hundred other Floridians had had the same idea and the park was closed on account of overcrowding, so we took shelter at a public boat slip at the end of a dirt road and had our lunch.  By the time we finished, the crowds were starting to thin and we only had to wait about 15 minutes before being let into the park.

I complain (a lot) about Florida…but it really can be a beautiful place and few places are prettier than Blue Springs on a bright, sunny day.  The water at the boil is the same temperature year around.  In the summer, it’s wonderfully cool, but in winter, the manatees follow the warm current back to its source.  As recently as a few weeks ago, there were several hundred manatees holed up at the Blue Springs boil.  Saturday, though, was head ‘em up, move ‘em out day.  As we walked along a boardwalk from the parking lot to the boil, we watched manatees, singly and in groups, going with the flow.

I took about twenty minutes of video, which I edited down to five minutes and uploaded to YouTube, which has been “processing” it for the last little while.  If it passes inspection, I’ll edit the URL into this post. (It did!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX-w1bh0Cqs )  OTOH, as great as it was to watch the manatee parade, the new “Old Florida” ethic keeps people well away from the wildlife (scrub jays notwithstanding), unlike the old “Old Florida” which was big on face-to-face interaction.  There are still some bits of old “Old Florida” around, and back in 2008, Gail and I went to Haulover Canal (cheek-by-jowl with the Kennedy Space Center) and got some close-ups….

By the time we’d walked to the boil and back, we’d walked nearly nine miles altogether and were ready to call it a day…but I had one more “event:” the Leesburg Mardi Gras Parade .  When you live on Main Street, your choices are simple: you either get into the parade spirit, or you spend the night some place else.  I was too worn out to do much celebrating, but I did score some beads…

Quite a day…