A 3 park morning.

It was early December and I was ready for another morning out with my camera. My first stop was the Florida Botanical Gardens in Largo. I ended up only taking a few pictures while I was there. I was busy looking for birds of which I found none.

I left the gardens and stopped at nearby McGough Park to see if there were any birds there. No birds but a lot of other critters. The bees have taken over this owl nest box.

A few of the turtles in the turtle pond.

Some of the permanently injured animals that live here (the nature center here houses animals that cannot be released back into the wild). Both owls had injured eyes.

On the way home I stopped at the Largo Nature Preserve and did find a few birds here.  You can usually find limpkins along the boardwalk here and they are use to people walking by. This one was sitting on the railing and made no attempt to move as I walked by. This is not cropped.

Not surprised to find the usual birds here. A blue gray gnatcatcher, a black and white warbler and a yellow rumped warbler.

Another usual bird, a pine warbler, was pigging out on caterpillars. He ate several while I was snapping and I was lucky enough for him to show them to me.

Aldridge Gardens

Just a few of the beautiful flowers we found at Aldridge Gardens in Birmingham during my visit with my sister. The weather was too beautiful to do anything indoors so we did a quick walk around the gardens before heading to lunch.

They had bee hives with glass sides. It was really cool to see inside the hive, watching the thousands of bees working.

Some of the critters around the lake. More to come on the gardens.

Our World Tuesday Graphicimage-in-ing: weekly photo linkup

Here comes the sun

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I knew it was going to be a good morning when I walked out on the trail at Circle B Bar Reserve at 8am and this was the view.

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I had not been out here since May so it was great to get out and walk around without it being terribly hot.

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The trails were quiet except for the birds making noise. The limpkins and phoebes were loud. It felt like a lot more moss had grown on trees.

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A very large bee hive right on the trail.

I only had my 300mm lens with me so all of these were taken with my Iphone.  That bee hive was so close that I would have only gotten an inch of it with my longer lens.  I’m looking forward to lots of long walks here this winter.

SkyWatch Friday