In this episode we go shopping, do laundry, Ellen gets a bad haircut, Steve get one that is even worse, we have a Key Lime shake and spend a half-day looking at birds...then there was Super Bowl Sunday.
Friday was shopping day. It is about a 100 miles round-trip to Homestead, where the nearest groceries can be found (if you discount the chips, soda and ice cream in the marina store), so that is where we were off for the day. We needed provisions, needed to do laundry and get our hair cut.
The Publix was pretty similar to all the others we've been to and it only took a sack of money in exchange for a few sacks of food. The prices in southeast Florida are higher than in northeast Florida for some reason. I though that it was that Okeechobee was just a small isolated town, but Homestead has several Publix markets and is just outside Miami. One of the items that we have bought a couple of times on this trip, that we do not buy at home, is rotisserie chicken. It is relatively cheap, Ellen debones them in Speedy while we are still in the parking lot (I can then return the bones) and we refrigerate the meat. We get at least three meals out of a single chicken—no oven required.
After food shopping it was off to get haircuts, we were both looking pretty shaggy. There was a place called the Haircuttery in the same mall is the Publix. Not knowing any better, we went there. They take a lot of hair off for $17. A bit too much in Ellen’s case; in my case it hasn't been this short since I was in the army...that was 1971. We definitely will not need haircuts until we get back to Boston. (There will be no photos posted of the results of this debacle.)
Then it was off to the laundry. We went to one we’d used before. It looked the same, but now used chip-based money cards in the machines. It cost an additional $2 just for the card, and that was before you could charge it up with funds. This is one of the recent laundromat schemes. Each uses its own type of card, rarely can you just use a credit or debit card. You can only add funds to the card using cash and only bills. Needless to say, the prices for washing and drying are not in even dollar amounts, so you are almost always left with excess on the card. I guess that if you are a regular customer, you just keep your card and keep refilling it, but those of us passing through take a hit.
Commercial laundromats are always more expensive as well, it cost $8 for a single load of laundry plus two bucks for the card. At the campgrounds we've stayed at there were coin laundries and the most expensive was half that. The laundromats always seem to be in areas which are primarily low income, where people rent and often don't have their own washers. The facilities we’ve used have been pretty busy...another example of taking advantage of the least advantaged
Laundry done, it was back to Flamingo, but not without a stop at Robert Is Here for a freshly-made Key Lime thick shake. Ellen didn't want her own—I'll just take a spoonful or two of your’s—half a shake later, I got it back. We will be back for more...next time she gets her own!
Yesterday was the park's ranger-led biweekly Big Day bird walk (actually bird ride). We met Ranger Christi at the Anhinga Trail parking lot for an 8am start for the six hour walk. It is an hour away from Flamingo, so it was an early start for us.
The Anhinga Trail parking lot is also the hangout of the park's delinquent Black Vultures (good name for a gang...). They hang around the lot, jump on people's cars and peck at the rubber stripping around the window and at the windshield wipers. The park supplies tarps and bungie cords to cover your vehicle to prevent damage. This means that they just jump on the cars and peck at the tarps. The ranger explained that they think it started because there was some odor in the rubber that attracted the vultures, but it now is just a learned behavior passed down through generations of vultures. They actually do it mostly in the morning while waiting for the thermals to build up so they can soar. Just a bunch of bored bad birds.
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| Get off that solar panel! |
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| Purple Gallinule |
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| Green Heron (and mirror twin) |
The Short-tailed Hawk is a pretty rare bird in Florida. It is also native to Mexico and a few are seen in Texas and Arizona. In Florida, they only occur in the southern part of the Florida peninsula and in the winter are only in the Everglades and the Keys. There are only about 100 nesting pairs in the state.
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| Short-tailed hawk |
From the Anhinga Trail we started driving in convoy to several sites along the main road, ending at the waterfront here in Flamingo. We stopped at the Long Key Picnic area (some warblers), Parotis Pond (waders and Roseate Spoonbills), West Lake (Common Gallinules, Coots and waders), Mrazek Pond (Green-winged and Blue-winged Teal, Pied-billed Grebes and wading birds), the sewage treatment plant (Black-necked Stilts, Avocet, Blue-winged Teal, Northern Shovelers, Lesser-Yellowlegs and a Spotted Sandpiper), Eco Pond (more wading birds) and, finally, the Flamingo waterfront where there were no flamingoes, but there was a flock of about 100 Willets joined by a single Marbled Godwit. It was an interesting six hours, but we didn't actually go anywhere we hadn't been before, which was a bit of a let-down. I think the group was so large, that the number of stops were cut down to those likely to be the most productive.
Today, Ellen and I got a leisurely start by walking over to Eco Pond rather than taking the ranger-led walk. There were no birds there that we hadn't seen before, but we did do the walk around the pond and found a few Painted Buntings in addition to the ones that were still to be seen at the entrance. We did see the Reddish Heron doing his hunting dance and the hawks fly in and out. We then biked over to the visitor center to look at the hundreds of birds on the flats (the usual Willets, herons, egrets, pelicans, skimmers, terns and gulls).
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| Dancing Heron |
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| Twin Red-shouldered Hawks |
As we arrived at the visitor center, I noticed an interesting unstayed two-masted sailboat in the marina. Of course, I had to go look. It was a junk-rigged trimaran owned by a young couple who had just bought it. They had left Scotland in September and had been looking for a boat in Florida ever since. They found this in the Keys after bicycling much of the southern half of the Florida east coast. They had started by renting a car, but after the first two hour drive to look at a totally trashed boat, they decided it would be easier and cheaper to just buy a couple of bikes and ride from boat to boat until they found the right one. I doubt they expected to ride all the way to Key West before finding it.
They had arrived at the Flamingo Marina as part of their shakedown cruise along Florida Bay on their way up to the west end of Okeechobee waterway. From there they hope to haul out and do the bottom, then continue through the canal to the east coast, then south to the Bahamas and the Caribbean, with the hope of doing the loop through the Caribbean Islands and back to Europe. It seemed a rather small boat for the Atlantic, but we wish them luck.
We were sitting around after lunch today, when our friends, Ruth and Alan arrived. They managed to get the site right next to us and we spent most of the afternoon catching up. Alan is the one who got Ellen and, by extension, I interested in submitting to eBird. We will be overlapping at Flamingo for a week and then we will precede them to the West Coast. They will be taking longer than us as they expect to spend more of the winter here than us, getting up to the panhandle about the time we leave for home at the beginning of March.
After a dinner of rotisserie chicken, steamed snow peas and ancient grain fusion (don't do it!), it was time to take a walk around the campground under clear skies and an almost full moon. The only Super Bowl here is the moon.
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