February 05th, 2024

It's a grey, rainy, gloomy, chilly Monday morning today. Bah!  So I'm going to cheer myself up by writing about my most recent hike with Joy!  That's right, my friends, it's another Photo Safari Report.   And I'm going to call this one the Bridge Hike.  You will find out about the why of that very shortly.

First of all, we decided to go to Deer Prairie Preserve because we hadn't been there in quite some time.  It was closed for, well it seemed like forever!  Then too, there were the wild hog incidents that seem to crop up in that particular preserve with more frequency than we are strictly comfortable with. But what the heck, what's life without risk eh?  Deer Prairie is open again?  
All righty...that's where we are headed.

Now one of the things about Deer Prairie Preserve is that right away, as soon as you park, you have to decide which way you are going to go, to the left or to the right.  We generally go to the right because that trail is Always accessible.  The trail to the left is on the other side of the water.  The Myakka River flows through it and in some places it widens to appear to be more of a pond or a lake.  And in this particular case it creates a stunningly beautiful, peaceful, reflective large pond:

And then, out of nowhere, it narrows and drops creating, for all intents and purposes, a waterfall.  Very cool:

It's all very dramatic and cool looking, I promise!  

And until this visit the only way to get across that pond/waterfall/river thingie was to wait until the dry season and the water is a wee bit lower and then carefully walk across the top of the falls.  Yeah, not the smartest thing we've ever done, but it's what we did.  Hey, it's their fault for putting what was obviously an awesome trail head right onthe other side of the water, right?  Who could possibly resist that allure?    Not us for sure!

This is where we walked across. See the marrow little stip of concrete here?  Yeah, it goes all along the lip of the "falls".  It's mostly under the water right now.

The entire time we've been hiking this preserve, that's how it was.   So imagine our surprise when we arrived and saw this instead:

Holy  Cats!  How awesome is that?  What a gorgeous bridge!  Here are some other shots of it:

Well of course we had to take that trail!  How could we not?  Off we went.

​Saw a lot of very cool trees.  Ready for some tree shots?  

Some insect related things:

A few flowers, not many this time 'round. That ought to be changing soon as we are heading toward spring:

Got a nice variety of birds.  My absolute favourite is the bird on the lily pad!  I had never seen that before! 

There actually was one more bird, a hawk.  There he sat, so regally at the tippy top of a tree looking down.  Just very steadily, continually looking down. Never once took his eyes off whatever it was he was checking out. So naturally we had to check it out too.  Here's the hawk:

And here is what he was looking at:

He was obviously the supervisor on this job!  LOLOL

I did take another photo that I particularly liked.  It's another reflection shot but when I turn it sideways, it kind of looks like Day and Night represented. See what you think:

So there you have it.  The Bridge Hike!  It was awesome!

Thanks for coming along :)  See ya'll soon!