Another Life Bird!

Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, Okochobee, FL - Site #16

Today, we walk 6.24 miles in search of birds, Ellen sees a life bird and we change sites.

A relatively short journal entry today. After a quiet and dark night and a relatively good night's sleep, it was a gray morning. We decided to tackle the trails of Kissimmee Prairie. While we had about 100 miles to choose from, we chose something a bit shorter, the Prairie Loop Trail, which runs from the Equestrian Campground, wandering through oak and palm hammocks and open prairie to the main park trail, the Military Road and back to the Equestrian Campground. This route plus the walk to and from Speedy turned out to be 6.24 miles and took us six hours. Half the time was standing still.

The trail was mostly sandy or grassy, with a bit of mud thrown in. It wasn't bad by the park's trail standards. At this time of year some of the trails have long stretches of knee-deep water to walk through.

We saw 25 species that we could identify today with lots of crows, vultures and Yellow-rumped and palm Warblers. There were a few Red-shouldered Hawks along the way and we saw our first Crested Caracara in Florida. We also managed to flush a few herons along the Military Road. Ellen's life bird was a lowly sparrow, a Grasshopper Sparrow and we believe that it was the rare Florida version. It popped up on a branch with a pair of Savannah Sparrow buddies and hung around long enough for blurry photos.

We almost didn't get the photos. The batteries on both Ellen's camera and mine died at the same time, just as we were trying to focus on the sparrows. Fortunately, I had a spare battery and the sparrows hung around long enough for me to change batteries. Unfortunately, Ellen did not have a spare with her (a situation that will not happen in the future), because she usually takes sharper pictures.

We relaxed a bit and had a late lunch when we returned, then changed sites. Wee decided that we'd stay here a couple of more nights and site 16, across from our site was available for that time and into the future. It turned out to be a non-reservable site, which meant that we couldn't reserve ahead for Wednesday and Thursday, but we could change sites today and extend our stay in the new site. So that's what we did. It isn't as private as the old site, but has a better prairie view.

Three hikers took over our old site, they are hiking the Florida Trail It runs from Key West to the Alabama border beyond Gulf Islands National Seashore. (From there it connect via trails in Alabama and Georgia to the Appalachian Trail, so one can hike from Key West to Mount Katadhin.)

Before dinner we took a short bike ride along the main road to look for Burrowing Owls. They supposedly hunt along the road at dusk, but not tonight along the the section we pedaled. We haven't seen owls yet but we heard Barred Owls hooting both last night and along our walk today.

More tomorrow. Still no photos due to low bandwidth.