November 07th, 2025

Joy has been away, and my foot is still slowly healing (but even slow progress is still progress, right?) so there have been no hikes in a while.  But yesterday, Joy and I threw caution to the wind and headed to Myakka State Park.  It's always a gamble; we never know what we will find or if we will find anything photo worthy at all!  It was a gloomy overcast day with a prediction of showers, so we weren't starting from a strong position, and we knew it. But we always go in knowing that we might return with just a very small handful of photos. 

As it turns out, there were plenty of pictures to be had. I took over 200 photos and Joy over 400! Holy Cats!  It took forever to weed through my batch, heartlessly deleting those that didn't measure up with impunity and adding some "light" to every single dang photo because it was so very cloudy and grey out.  And the water level in the mighty Myakka River was low, very low, sometimes non-existent low which was a shock.  But that's okay.  It felt great to be out there once again, to spend time with Joy, and to be in nature once again.

I can only say that nature must really like us back because wowie!  So many birds! SO MANY BIRDS! oh and a few other things too, of course, but mostly BIRDS!  So this Photo Safari Repot will, of course, be called the So Many Birds hike.

​I think the birdie pictures ought to be grouped by a random commonality.  I'll begin with birds in the water.  Here We Go:

Then of course birds NOT in water:

The funny thing with the turkeys, at some point I said to Joy, isn't it funny that we haven't seen any turkeys today and she said, well we haven't seen them......yet!  And she was correct. As soon as we came around a bend, there they were, an entire flock all at once!  Ask and ye shall receive!  

​As I stated initially, birds weren't the Only things that we saw, there were a few other critters:

Oh and this is our version of Autumn Colour.  Are you ready?

Maybe one last bird?  It's not a good clear shot but I still really like it. You don't have to if you don't want to, I won't be offended.

And here we are, we've made it all the way to the end of the So Many Birds Hike!  Thanks for coming along on this Photo Safari!  Have a great weekend, see ya soon!