December 10th, 2020

It's time, once again, for my weekly Photo Safari Report!  Woohoo!

As you can clearly see from the photos above (Joy on the let and me on the right) it's still kind of chilly out here.  People always think of Florida as a place that is perpetual summer.  Hate to be the one to break it to you, but nope.  We have brisk weather days too.  Not a lot of them, to be fair. But we have them.  And perhaps because we are more accustomed to hot than cold, even a little cooler feels frigid by comparison.

It was a pretty day, 42 degrees but sunny when we set out.  As you can see, I finally gave in and hauled out my vacuum sealed Colorado clothes for this hike.   And before you ask, the clothes Tim and I rarely wear are vacuum sealed because this is a small house and vacuum sealing is a terrific answer when you have THIS much stuff but only this much space.

Anyway, we decided to drive south a couple of towns to hit up a few preserves we haven't visited in a long time.  About 9 months as a matter of fact.  First stop was Ollie's Pond.   We did not see the alligator predicted on the signs in the photo but we did see a number of beautiful birds.

 I took a lot more photos of flowers, water and trees than birds.  It is such a pretty place to walk and the light was beautiful.  Makes it hard to resist, so I didn't ;) I hope the folks who live nearby know just how lucky they are!!

Once we circled the entire pond, we moved on to the Audubon-Pennington Preserve.  It was about 15 minutes away and every time we have visited we have been the ONLY people visiting. Always nice.  There were very few folks at Ollie's, and we all were very respectful of each other's space, but having NO other humans around was even better.  

Audubon- Pennington is a such a beautiful and unusual place.  It gives that feeling of being out of time.  As if we had stepped into the past, a forest primeval kind of thing.  It's pretty awesome.  Surprisingly we saw no birds. Not a single one.  A few lizards and a couple of sassy squirrels but no birds at all.  A little odd.  Which doesn't take away from the beautiful environment at all.

One of the things that really tickled me was  discovering that some recent visitor had written a hello and goodbye note in the sand of the trail.  Not sure why it struck such a chord with me, but it surely did.

I didn't get a lot of photos there, it's quite shady. But still there were a few.  And somehow, black & white photography seemed to serve those photos best:

And just  a couple of regular colour photos.

Afteward we headed back toward Venice and once in town, we decided to stop at the Rookery to see what's happening there.  The answer was a whole lot of construction. But a few birds were still around.  Oh and one alligator.  !!!!!!!!

So there you have it.  A very Birdie sort of hike that day.  I love how they are all different.  We never know what we will find. And every week, I'm excited to find out , what we will see on the next hike ;)

​Hope you enjoyed coming along ;)