Silver Springs

On Sunday, I was invited to go to Silver Springs. I was hesitant to agree since it was a $35.00 admission charge, but I haven't been in a while and thought it might be a nice thing to do. Plus they had some coupons on-line that I had planned on printing out, but of course didn't. Ended up hitting a hotel looking for coupons and got lucky with free passes to get into Silver Springs, wooh whoo! Happy girl I was.

We started out looking at the white alligators (true albinos) who looked very bored in their little tank. But I guess they can't hang with the rest of the alligators in the sun, huh? Sun burn and all. Plus possibly killed by the other alligators, etc. In the same area was some otters, and when active these guys can be too much fun. If there was a bench in here, I may not have gotten much farther into the park. I did shoot a little video for ya though. See at the bottom.

From here we checked out the rest of the alligator / crocodile enclosures. Silver Springs does have some very unique members of the crocodilian family. So we poked around and looked at some of these. The one with the really skinny snout is called a false gharial. In reality it is a crocodile, but it looks very much like a gharial. I pulled up pics of a gharial on the internet and their snouts are even more narrow. It looks really odd.

The next odd one was a pygmy crocodile. This looks like a juvenile crocodile except its snout is almost a triangle. Where normal crocs have really long snouts, this one looks like it got stunted. But it's full grown. This is as big as she gets. I know you can't tell from the picture, but she's about 3 feet long.

While we were in the crocodilian section, we stopped and watched 3 shows. One show had alligators between 1-3 years old. One show had snakes. And one show had a bat (cool), scorpion (scary), and a tarantula. I touched the tarantula. Only for about 2 seconds, but it still counts!!!! Her name was Charlotte.

Silver Springs is most famous for their glass bottom boats. There are three different boat rides in total and we took them all. Each ride focuses on something a little different, history, nature and Hollywood. One of the guides told us over 90 movies have been shot at Silver Springs, I'm not sure I believe him, but I know a lot of movies have been shot here. He listed Smokey and the Bandit and I don't remember much of the movie that could have benefited here. It was mostly "road" shots. But multiple Tarzan movies were shot here, Creature from the Black Lagoon and many more. There are still some interesting things to see at the bottom. Lots of turtles and springs. There used to be lots of fish too. Now there are a couple of fish, but mostly just Plecostomus - you know those algae eaters people put in their fish tanks? Once they get too big the dump them in a river or lake, where they find that fish eggs taste better than algae. So now there are very little fish.

But the boat rides were cool, and we could see all the way down to the bottom. We saw some wild alligators, turtles, anhinga, little blue herons, swamp chickens, and a few other things.

In the Spring of 1938 some moron brought over a couple of Rhesus Monkeys from Asia and put them on an island in the middle of Silver River. He owned a tourist boat company and he thought it would be cool to have some monkeys around for scenery. Unfortuately, he didn't do any research before making this decision and when he returned to the island the next day, not a single monkey was still there. A little research would have informed him that the Rhesus Monkeys like to swim :) So now there is a feral population of Rhesus Monkeys that range between Gainsville and Tampa. Currently there are some living in a city park in Lakeland. While we were there, we saw two monkeys stealing food from the big Aldabra Tortoise.

We also went up the lighthouse ride, which gave us a great

view of the park and allowed me to play with my new camera. The ride was in constant motion, so most of the scenery pics here were taken while I was moving. I'm very happy with this camera.

There is also a world of bears section and a petting zoo. The Kodiak bear here is named Max and he used to be in the circus. Now he hangs here. He was really really big.

The petting zoo contained llamas that spit, a couple of miniature horses, some turkeys, swans (ya, those are well known for their friendliness) a donkey and basically a bunch of cranky critters that didn't want to have anything to do with us. But I got a couple of nice pictures.

Herrmann's Royal Lipizzan Stallions

Saturday morning was spent in Myakka
City with my parents and other friends to see the Lipizzan horses that are home for the offseason. It's kind of like a practice show that allows them to get the younger horses used to performing and keeps

the horses use to audiences and flash photography etc. They had some horses that were better dancers, and they had horses that were better "war horses". The Lipizzans were originally war horses because the are really good at kicking and rearing up. Some of them can even kick up and kick back at the same time. Pretty interesting. The show was free, but they asked for donations, sold snacks and souviners. It's a nice little family deal. And a great place to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. The horses are beautiful, and after the show you can go into the barn and see the horses or take your young kid on a pony ride.

For those of you not familiar with the Lipizzan Horses, they were almost destroyed during WWII. They were saved by General Patton, and they still are pretty rare. They are compact and muscular, with very powerful hindquarters, allowing them to do the difficult "High School" (Dressage) movements, including the "airs above the ground." They generally have a strong-featured head with a convex profile, set high on a well-muscled, arched neck. They have short cannons, their legs have good bone, and well-sloped shoulders. Their gaits are powerful and elastic, although different in style from the Warmblood breeds seen in many dressage competitions. Lipizzans are naturally balanced, well-known for excellent trainability and intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipizzan - for more information
http://hlipizzans.com/welcome.htm - if you wish to see the horses for yourself

Who you gonna call????

Ok, I played a lot last week, so no playing this weekend. I'm sleeping a lot this weekend and putting some time into my book that has been waiting patiently for me to return to it. Normally in a weekend like this, I wouldn't even bother to post. However, I had a funny this afternoon on my route and I thought I would share. I followed this van on 41 south of Ft Myers for about 10 minutes before I actually paid any attention to it. Then I had to try and dig my camera out of my purse, get the memory card back into it and get a decent pictures before it turned off. Luckily, the pictures came out well before it turned off at Corkscrew Rd. If you click to enlarge, you will see that they specialize in Paranormal Diving. Yeah. I'm sure if there are ghosts, shipwrecks would be a prime target. However, how do you communicate with an underwater ghost? How does an underwater ghost haunt? It couldn't make funny noises. I suppose it could rattle chains, but would the chain rattling noise actually travel through the water? So many questions.... But I
liked the van, thought some of you might also.

A day in Savannah

Sunday led me to Savannah with Carla. Carla has a bunch of time off for the holidays and I have very little, so we just went for the day. We started off with a Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tour. Our guide Rebecca had first hand knowledge of all the charactors in the book and probably spilled more secrets than she should, but it was an excellent tour. And Carla and I love knowing all those secrets.

The tour led us to the Bonaventure Cemetery where we got to see some great works of art and some semi-famous gravestones. The last time I took this tour, our tour guide spent a lot of time showing us the work of John Walz throughout the town, but primarily in the cemetery. This time we focused more on the people from the book. At least the talking part was. We still spent a little time at the cemetery and I got some great pictures. Also learned a little about gravesites. A woman holding a wreath means that she had children. If the wreath has fallen from the womans hands, it means that she had no children and died unfullfilled (or happy and sane, depending on how you look at it). An oblisk is only located on the graves of men (huge surprise) and a broken pillar represents a life cut short.

After the tour, we ended up on River Street where we had a few drinks and a fantastic lunch. We did a little shopping and both ended up with a t-shirt and a book. The book is by The Lady Chablis and its called “Hide my Candy”, lol. For those of you that read the Midnight in the Garden book, you should find this funny. If you haven’t read it, you should.

We stuck around long enough for a ghost tour. It was the worst ghost tour I’ve ever taken. I don’t think it takes a huge amount of talent to lead a ghost tour, but you do need to be a decent story teller. After all, that is why we take the tour – to hear the stories. Needless to stay, our tour guide had no talent whatsoever. We bailed when the tour got close to our parking garage. It sucks that we waited around for it when we still had to drive back to Tampa. When I say ‘we’ I mean Carla, cause I slept the whole way, lol.

SOS Bird Sanctuary

Saturday morning landed me at the newly open SOS Bird Sanctuary in Sarasota. Over the past few years the term "sanctuary" has been abused in order to cash in on the trendy Eco-responsibility many people are leaning towards. Unfortunately, not all sanctuaries are true sanctuaries. Many of them are roadside zoos using the term sanctuary to bring in more business (and money). I've seen it happen repeatedly. According to Scott, one of the biologists that help keep SOS up and running, that is kind of what happened to the previous sanctuary that was located at this location. SOS took control of the sanctuary recently and they are getting back to their roots. Barn Owl

I'm happy to say that SOS Bird Sanctuary is the real deal. It isn't flashy. It isn’t designed to cater to the tourist. It’s there for the birds. It offers a permanent home to birds that are healthy but previous injuries will prevent them from surviving on their own. It also takes newly injured birds, provides necessary medical care and when ready, releases them back into the wild. As new as they are, they already have some success stories under their belt.

Screech Owls

They still have a lot of work to do, but it’s up and running and the important things are in place. I was there pretty early in the morning and the education portion wasn’t set up yet so I didn’t get a chance to evaluate it, but there is a small education portion. There is a gift shop in the plans but it hasn’t been set up yet.

Red Shouldered Hawk

For all my friends and family that would like to visit, SOS is located at 1708 Ken Thompson Parkway in Sarasota. It is immediately past the Mote Aquarium on the right. There is signage but you have to look for it. They are also looking for volunteers, so anyone with some free time on their hands, this is a good place to spend it. There isn’t a heavily structured volunteer program, so no worries about long commitments. You can volunteer for only day if you wish.

Hours are 10-5 everyday and admission is free, but there is a small donation box to collect voluntary contributions. These are good people, doing a good thing, so lets give them our support! And for those occasional days when you need something interesting to do, keep these folks in mind for volunteering.

If you look closely, you'll notice the Sandhill Cranes above have splints on their legs. Turns out they are frequently attacked by turtles and golfers. Hmmm.

New calanders for sale this year!

Due to being broke this year, I'm only ordering a couple of calanders as gifts. But if anyone would like one, they are for sale again through Lulu.com. Or you can just click here to find it:

The Great Skunk Ape Hunt 2008

Carla and I finally made it back to the Skunk Ape Headquarters! We embraced the cheeziness and had a really great time. Plenty of pictures with the big monkey statues.






We played with lots of critters including this adorable baby alligator. No rubber band on his mouth. No risk at all. The birds were not in good spirits today so we didn't handle them. They went on "time out" within 2 minutes of our interaction. But Carla was flirting with this cutie Macaw who had a little crush on her.



We made more attention to snakes on this visit than I had on my previous visit. Rick (the animal keeper) just opened the pens so we could get could pictures. Sounded great until he wondered off to take care of other things. But the snakes weren't really that active and didn't chase us down or anything. The snakes were huge though. Some of the smaller ones weighed about 60 lbs, many of them significantly larger. Before we left this yello monster got pretty active.









They also had some big gators, turtles, and emus in the back. This particular emu posed very nice for me and I got a couple of pretty cool pictures of him. Doesn't he remind you of one of the characters from "The Dark Crystal".



I got a handful of really good pictures of this guy but he always looks a little evil, lol!



Our second stop for the day was the Big Cypress National Preserve. Got some great pictures here. Saw some deer, turtles, woodstorks, kingfishers, woodpeckers, fish, and some cool looking swamp trees. Along the road throughout the entire drive of the everglades are gators. Big ones, small ones, really big ones.... About ever 30 feet, there was another gator. We stopped and grabbed a couple of great pictures.





Turtles on a log!

Just a pretty pic!
Deer on the side of the road!

Lots of gators...

And for a little bonus: If you've ever wanted to see what a turtle feeding frenzy looked like, here is your chance...