April 1-11, 2025

Springtime is always a good time to visit Florida with the objectives of seeing museums, botanical gardens, and to photograph birds. The first stop for two days was in St. Petersburg. I stayed along the seaside in Treasure Island, slightly north of St. Petersburg beach. The first day I visited the Salvadore Dali Art Museum. The architecture was just as interesting as the art work which was pretty incredible in itself that I can’t even begin to describe.

In the afternoon I went to the Chihuly Museum with the many beautiful glass works. I have seen these exhibits in many places, but they never cease to amaze.

Across the street is the Morean Art Center and includes the Glass and Hot Shop. I saw a nice demonstration of glass blowing.

The next day I first went to the St. Petersburg Sunken Gardens, which is over a century old and one of the oldest “roadside” type of attraction in the U.S. “The Gardens began in 1903, when plumber and avid gardener George Turner Sr. (1881-1961) purchased six acres of land,^[3] including a shallow lake 10 feet (3.0 m) below sea level, which he drained to form his private “sunken” garden. ” Wikipedia more if your interested.

In the afternoon, I visited the Imagine Museum of art glass.

A fanciful self portrait.

I will show just a couple sunset scenes from the beach.

Now I am headed south to Sarasota and Venice Florida. In Venice there is the Audubon Society Rookery. It is on a small island in the middle of a pond. The birds like the spot because they are safe from predators. There are many kinds of birds trying to stake out a spot for their nests, probably at least 25-30 nests. I visited around noon (not good light) and again towards sunset. the second and third photos are Anhinga almost grown chicks and adult.

Great White Egrets with chicks and one male is displaying the mating filmy feathers.

In downtown Sarasota right on the bay are the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

I found these birds as I crossed Florida to the Atlantic Coast. In the first are Sandhill Cranes with a single baby chick. They kept walking away from me. The second is a Roseate Spoonbill.

I toured the Kennedy Space Center on an all day excursion, which is near Titusville and east of Orlando. The three photos are from a bus ride out to the Apollo Saturn moon landing building.

Another large display building contained a lot of exhibits from the Space Shuttle. This is the actual Atlantis Shuttle. A guide pointed out that the shuttle had 24,000 heat protecting tiles that had to be inspected and waterproofed after each flight. The cargo bay is big enough to carry two large buses. There were over 30 flights of the shuttle that built the current space station. The long arm that is labeled Canada was use to maneuver the equipment out of the cargo bay.

Next I headed up the coast to St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. The first afternoon I spent at the lighthouse, which is still in working condition and was built in the early 1870s.

The next series of photos are all birds from the rookery at the Alligator Farm. There were 30-40 alligators below the trees where well over a hundred birds were nesting and raising the young chicks. I spent from 9:30 to 3:30 photographing the birds from a walkway very close to the trees. Even iPhones could get good photos as the birds were that close. On my DSLR camera with a 400mm lens I was sometimes too close. I took probably 500 photos, so I will be selective and only show you the best ones and the variety of birds present.

The first photos are of the snowy egret which is a lot smaller than the great egrets. Notice the big stick for nest building.

The next photos are of the Little Blue Herons. Notice that this bird is swallowing whole some sort of crab. I have seen other photos of all of these birds swallowing whole fish – some of them quite large. You wonder how they get it down, but the their neck can greatly expand.

These birds are called Wood Storks and are bit ugly in my opinion. I was unable to see their nest as they were well hidden, but did observe a lot of nest building activity. The bottom photos are remarkable in that I was even able to get a lock on them in flight right above me.

There were lots of Great Egerts with chicks in various levels of maturity. They made the most noise wanting to be fed. The chicks are fed initially by their parents as they regurgitate partially digested food like fish, crustaceans, amphibians, and insects. They will feed the chicks up to 50 or more days gradually converting to whole food.

As you can see, the birds were always busy collecting, sometimes large sticks, for nest building.

Roseate Spoonbills were the most colorful birds to watch and I have many photos of them.

Spoonbills with the young chicks, but not exactly feeding them.

Alligators at last with the woman feeding a lucky gator a chicken.

These are called cattle egrets.

Here are a few photos of St. Augustine and I took an hour long trolley tour. Flagler College, the oldest house, and the oldest fort.

Homossasa Springs, back on the Gulf side, has rescued birds and other animals.

It’s always hard to get a single flamingo photo and I especially like this one standing on one leg with the reflection.

My last stop for the blog was in Tarpon Springs where they still harvest a few natural sponges. It was a big industry, 1920-50s, when Greeks and others immigrated. I had the best Greek dinner of the whole trip the last night.