Saturday, February 4, 2017
Around sunrise we drove to Royal Palm and the Anhinga Trail hoping to get good birds and morning light. We also were trying to get a jump on the Saturday crowds. At this hour it seemed to be mostly photographers unpacking loads of gear.
As we entered the parking lot we were greeted by the usual gang of Black Vultures. (I don't know what the term is for a group of vultures is but "Gang" is appropriate to this one. The vultures at the Royal Palm parking lot are known for their bad behavior. They hop up onto the parked cars and chew off the rubber window gaskets around windshields and side windows, windshield wiper blades and any odd bit of plastic or rubber. The Park Service supplies tarps and bungee cords so that vistors can cover their cars to help prevent this damage. The front windshield and door windows on Speedy have visible gaskets, so we grabbed a tarp and covered them before closing up the van and heading down the Anhinga Trail.
It was a pretty good walk. There were alligators galore but we were more interested in the birds. We were not very successful in finding the smaller species in the brush, but the wading birds were all around although there numbers seemed fewer than in previous years. In addition to the abundance of Anhinga, nesting in the trees over the pond, we saw lots of White Ibis flying over, Great Egrets, Great Blue and Little Blue Herons, Black-crowned and Green Herons, and an American Bittern.
The Alligators were in bellowing mode, the "Hey baby, look at me" call of the mating season. We saw one very large gator across the pond lift both its tail and huge head completely out of the water in tones that reminded one of a lion's roar, only slightly lower in frequency.
When we got back to Speedy, the roof was covered in vultures. I shooed them away and we got read to leave. As Ellen was closing the roof vent, she noticed something in the fan blades. At first she thought it was a leaf but it turned out to be a piece of the gasket that seals the vent when closed. We almost always leave the vent open when we leave the van to allow the warm air to escape. The vultures had gotten their heads under the partially open vent and chewed the gasket.
When we got back to the campground, I borrowed a ladder from the campground host to check out the damage. They had basically stripped off the outside of the gasket three-quarters of the way around the vent and removed it totally from the back edge. They had also chewed at most of the caulking around the various fittings on the roof, none so badly that the fittings will leak (we hope). We will have a lot of re-caulking to do when we get home not to mention a new gasket.
We spent the rest of the day hanging out at the campground. Ellen made several circuits looking for warblers. She saw a bright yellow Prairie Warbler at the day-use area and also in the bushes of our own site. I was feeling pretty beat and just relaxed and read and then I started sniffling. I seem to have picked up a cold somewhere, on some doorknob or shopping cart undoubtedly.
We are off to the Flamingo Campground at the very end of the Everglades in the morning. We plan to stop at the Visitor Center first to upload this week's Speedy Journal entries and some photos. I don't know if we will have any Internet or phone access at Flamingo, so it may be a while until the next posting.
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Your vulture description made me recall the buzzards of Natal when we were in Africa. Our guide pointed out that they see food before the "food" is ready.
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