Fort De Soto on Christmas day

Posted on January 13, 2014 by dinajohnston

Ruddy turnstone convention on the jetti.

This one was on the pier.

His feet were tangled up together. He was flying around pretty good so I’m not sure how you could catch him.

My first common loon sighting of the winter. There were two of them swimming around in a lagoon.

They are not common at all.

A cormorant was going after a fish on someone’s pole.

He’s thinking he has an easy meal.

He was giving it a good tug but in the end the fisherman was able to pull it up with the fish intact.

Although later, he did manage to steal a fish from someone who wasn’t paying attention.

Someone pulled up a starfish. Back he went into the water.

I checked on the old owl’s nest from last winter. There was an owl sitting there sleeping. Hopefully there’s an egg underneath it. Last year the owl couple had two babies but only one survived.

A great blue heron flying by.

We had a big late breakfast and wasn’t going to eat dinner until much later on Christmas day. We were tempted to spend the day on the couch in our pj’s watching old Christmas movies but it was just to gorgeous outside. Sunny and 70 degrees. My sister was visiting for the week from South Dakota and she wanted to get outside and walk around so we headed to Fort De Soto. It was a perfect afternoon. We walked around both piers and looked around at the North beach but it was too windy for any shorebirds. Perfect day off.

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Breakfast with the burrowing owls

Posted on April 21, 2012 by dinajohnston

Yum, dirty frog for breakfast!

He’s completely ignoring me while he’s chowing down.

He looks over like “Wait, someone’s watching me eat.”

This one looks like he’s eating dirt. I think it’s a bug or something just completely covered in dirt.

Okay, now it looks like he’s eating twigs. He was chewing on it.

They looks so cute when they are holding something.

Just a few more pictures from my trip to Fort Lauderdale. I caught two owls eating for a few minutes. I didn’t see them catch their food. They seemed to have had it stored in their hole.

Spoonbill and an owl at Kapok Park

Posted on January 30, 2012 by dinajohnston

Slinging water

Gulp!

Keeping an eye on that duck.

: Great horned owl sitting on an egg.

There are tons of birds at Kapok Park. I can hear them. Finding them and getting their pictures are a whole different thing. Late on a Sunday afternoon I decided to head out for a walk but I think I wasn’t really in the mood. The easiest thing to find was a lone spoonbill staying very busy feeding in the water right below the boardwalk . She didn’t stop for a second. Just kept swinging her beak back and forth in the water. I watched her for a while, taking tons of pictures. Before I left I stopped by the owl’s nest. She was sitting there like she has been for several weeks now. Since this trip I have heard the owl baby has been born so I’m on a mission to get some owl baby pictures. Check back later for those.

P.S. I think the reason I was in a funky mood that afternoon was because my little Spikey, a 6 year old cockatiel, had spent a day in the vet hospital. She was egg bound. When I got home from work Thursday night, she was not her usual self so I ran her to the overnight animal hospital. They kept her overnight and early the next morning I moved her to a bird specialist in north Tampa. She stayed there all day Friday and laid a very large egg. Almost the size of a ping pong ball. Her eggs before were the size of a jelly bean. When I went to pick her up Friday night, she laid another one while I was there. She’s been getting lots of medicine and is doing fine now but there will always be that risk again. They gave her hormone shots to stop the egg laying but that is only temporary.

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