vertical oyster garden | Dina's Wildlife Adventures

I found a great blue heron nest in the neighborhood. It sits high up in the pine tree over a small pond. I’ll be keeping an eye for babies but I won’t see them until they are pretty big since the nest sits far back on the branch.

I’ve been stopping by the neighborhood eagle nest almost every day hoping to see a baby head pop up. This was in mid-January and at this point I wasn’t even sure there was a baby although an adult has been sitting here every time I go by. I hadn’t seen anything being fed at this point. It was still early though.

I noticed the kestrel is back. There was one hanging out around the eagle nest all last winter so I wonder if this is the same one.

It’s a few days later and I see an eagle sitting on the nest tower. I couldn’t see another one but the mate might have been laying down on the nest. A turkey vulture flew close by.

I drove by the big open field in front of the utility towers near the back of the neighborhood and I could just barely see movement on a tower far down the clearing. I got my camera out thinking it was probably an osprey on that nest. The top shot was cropped up a little and I can see there’s an eagle on the nest. When I extremely cropped it up I could see a baby big enough to be sitting up on the nest. (There were 2 babies on this nest). I can’t get any closer to this nest since it’s sitting on Duke Energy property.

I could see a red shoulder hawk sitting high up in the tower in front of the eagles.

After seeing the far away nest I turned around and saw white pelicans flying high overhead. I waited a little while hoping they would get closer since they were just circling around. They came a little closer and then took off over the trees.

A few days later I stopped by RE Olds Pier to see if any eagles were fishing along the pier but all I found was a great egret and a spotted sandpiper.

The tide was so low that you could see an old crab trap out in the water. I wonder how long this has been sitting there with all of those barnacles on it.

The vertical oyster garden ropes that are hanging off the pier were exposed and are starting to get covered with barnacles. There may be some small oysters forming on it as well. They placed them here to grow oysters since they help filter and clean the water.

At the end of December I woke up and peeked out the window. It was really foggy so I got ready quickly and headed out the door. I love it when it’s foggy. I stopped by the nearby fishing pier early that morning and could not see across the bay. I could barely make out the end of the pier.

I noticed these strands of oyster shells hanging under the pier and looked them up when I got back home. These are VOG’s (vertical oyster gardens). The water around the shore of Safety Harbor and Oldsmar (which is Old Tampa Bay) was found to be the least healthy in all of the Tampa Bay. Not surprised. There’s a new Save Our Bay program and the easiest thing to start with was using oysters to filter out the water. One oyster can filter out 50 gallons of water a day. There were a lot of these on the dock and they are encouraging people who live on the water to hang these on their docks as well. It will take several months for the oysters to start to grow on these so I’ll keep an eye out.

Next I headed to the Safety Harbor fishing pier since I was close by running errands. It was foggy here as well but that didn’t stop those kayakers from being out.