My first trip to Ding Darling.

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A cormorant and a green heron along the water.

A juvenile night heron filling up on fiddler crabs.

The fiddler crabs were out by the thousands since it was a low tide.

Pretty purple.

Mangroves at low tide. You can really see the oysters that have built up on the roots.

The water from the observation deck.

For years I have heard that Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge was the place to go to see birds. Half of Sanibel Island, just south of Fort Myers, is the refuge. It is on the east side of the island and runs along the water. There are lagoons and inlets all along the trail. It’s a paved driving trail over 4 miles long. We must have been there during the off season because we saw very few birds there. The winter snow birds hadn’t arrived yet, it was too early for fall migration and the summer birds had disappeared. It was still a beautiful place to visit.  I walked most of the trail and Brett would drive ahead and then wait for me to catch up. It was too perfect outside to be in the car. I need to get back there in the winter.

6 thoughts on “My first trip to Ding Darling.”

  6. Clarissa Atkinson – Cambridge, Massachusetts – In an earlier life, I taught and wrote books and articles about medieval history, including "Mystic and Pilgrim: The 'Book' and the World of Margery Kempe" and "The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages." More recently I turned my attention to the 1950s and found Claudia Cumberbatch Jones, the black radical feminist who was deported from the U.S. in the McCarthy years. In London she founded and edited the West Indian Gazette. I published an essay about Claudia Jones in the Women’s Review of Books in 2006: “A Strange and Terrible Sight in Our Country.” In 2008-09 I was a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University conducting further research on Claudia Jones. Lately I’ve been thinking about coming of age in the 1950s. You can find and buy my books at: http://www.amazon.com/author/clarissawatkinson
    Clarissa Atkinson on said:

    I love Ding Darling — but saw fewer birds this year. I asked one of the volunteers:
    https://oldestvocation.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/for-the-birds/

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