Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Our new Backyard...St Marks National Wildlife Refugee, Florida

Howdee all,

We left St.George yesterday and drove 2 hours east to our new backyard.
We are staying in a small County Campground in Newport, Florida just a few minutes drive to
St. Marks National Wildlife Refugee and a half hour south of Tallahassee.

The Campground is partly wooded, we have full hookups..which means, unlike the state parks, I can take longer showers and do laundry.....Yipee...i wont stink and my clothes will be clean!
We can walk to a small river to view Manatees(haven't done that yet)



If you look on the map below you can see the refugee south of us..follow Lighthouse road..rt. 59.



View Larger Map



Today we drove to the Refugee to see what it was all about. We stopped at the visitor center, where we saw great close up views of Red-Shouldered Hawks on the Balcony railing.

below ..view of Visitor Center from trail
The Refugee is very large...and spreads throughout several towns.
Today we saw just a portion...
We checked out a few of the many ponds.




We had a fun day birding...
Lots of birdies here.
Canvasbacks and Redhead ducks were some of our highlights.

check out this beautiful Redhead Duck in the video.....



Black Necked Stilt
Great Egret

look at this Pied billed Grebe ..It kept spreading its wings like below..
does anyone know why it did this? Is it trying to attract a mate?


not such a great photo..but I loved how the green on this Green winged Teal...
just glowed.

We drove Lighthouse road...
to the end.

more ponds and birdies..gulls, terns, shorebirds, ducks, snipes, soras
etc.
We are very excited ...this is a beautiful refugee and birding is great. We look forward to the next week here...and who knows...we may extend our stay another week.

Goodnight from us here at St. Marks Wildlife Refugee

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