Well…a bit over 3 weeks since my last post and while I coulda blamed it on Neil for no processing images for me they’ve actually been in the export folder for over 2 of those weeks so it ain’t his fault. I coulda blamed it on us being just extraordinarily busy…and I guess that’s part of it at least for the first couple of weeks. Easter week fell in there and that’s got a lot of choir commitments and then it was the final MasterSingers rehearsal and concert of the year but the rest of it I just have to put down to I couldn’t find my round tuit I guess.

Anyways…we do have a couple of things coming up…the Florida Ladies of Elks (FLOE) RV rally which will be up in Ocala and since we don’t have an RV any longer there’s a rental thing we’re going to do for that. Then we have a Saint-Säens Organ Symphony concert up in Chicago 

Round the homestead…nothing really going on there either. It’s starting to get warm but we’ve been mostly able to get the windows open at last part of the day most days…but it won’t be long until we’re pretty much shut up for the summer…our least favorite time of the year here in Florida as we much prefer having open windows and getting the breeze.

The photos that Neil processed for me are from a trip up to the Venice Rookery he took in March…it’s about an hour or so drive up there and there’s a small Audubon Society pond that gets pretty tremendous numbers of nesting wading birds this time of the year. It is situated just off of US-41 in Venice and is a medium sized pond with a viewing area on the east side so you get that nice morning light if you get there just about sunrise which was what he did.

Here’s a google satellite view of the pond…it’s the one on the left with the island in the middle…strangely enough the one on the right side with the island in the middle gets pretty much no nests established. The available nesting island is about 2/3 of the size it was before the hurricanes a couple years back, As you can see…it’s a really short walk from the parking log to the viewing area and while one can walk completely around to the other side that is only a viable spot in the afternoon as everything is backlit and silhouetted in the morning and the island is closer to the east side anyway. US-41 is a couple hundred yards to the north of this shot.

Glossy Ibis

Great Egret coming in for a landing

This is a Swallow Tailed Kite hatching that has not fledged yet. Kites are raptors and despite coming here for going on 15 years or so now this is the first non water bird he’s ever seen nesting there. It’s not a very good image as it never turned towards him and you can see it’s about 2/3 of the way from the hatching downy feathers to the juvenile plumage.

Since that’s a lousy shot here are a couple of adult shots from an earlier outing down at Corkscrew and from our back yard. Kites normally diet almost exclusively on insects as you can see in the flight one from breakfast in its talons. However they do catch small rodents and other critters to feed the young as bringing back enough insects to help it grow would be hard. Kites are medium sized about 25 inches in length and with a 3.5-4.5 foot wingspan. How they got their name seems pretty obvious once you see one. We have one that hunts in our neighborhood that we know of but it is not an everyday sighting.

Glossy Ibis launching

Cormorants

A different Glossy Ibis…there were probably 200 or 250 birds on the island when he was there.

Great Egret

Red Winged Blackbird

Great Blue Heron that just missed a catch

Brewer’s Blackbird

Black Crowned Night Heron arriving

Juvenile Black Crowned Night Heron…obviously it recently fledged since it’s not mature enough to mate and is still learning the ropes from its parents.

Glossy Ibis with some building material

Black Crowned again

Male Great Egret with it’s courtship display working on attracting the ladies

Anhinga hatchling still getting it’s flight feathers

All in all a pretty decent outing although not as many nests as in years past but then there’s a lot less island to nest on now.

Interesting things found on the net

Sign discussing what dogs are allowed inside.

People always say things like ‘go to the fork in the road’ when you ask them for directions…finally found it.

Interesting rathole about Japan that Neil went down (well, he at least thought it was interesting). The country has over 14,000 islands stretching over a length of almost 2,000 miles but there are 4 main islands of which Honshu (which contains Tokyo, Kyoto and most of the other cities you’ve heard of) and it is about 800 miles out of the 2,000 total the country stretches over. Total land area in the country is about 125 million of which about 100 million live on Honshu. The thing that took him down the rathole was the image below…the red area contains 50% of the entire population. Having spent a couple months there back in the 80s as part of his tour at the NROTC unit at Auburn University…he can vouch for that as it is just incredibly crowded. 

An interesting side note…the gap you an see between the north end of Honshu and the southern end of Hokaido at the upper right is the Tsugaro Strait with the Sea of Japan on the west side and the Pacific on the east side of the strait. Back on his second submarine when they were in WestPac they had spent some time in the Sea of Japan but then got orders to go to Yokosuka for a port visit. The only problem was that the time frame to get there required them to run at the maximum speed the ship could go in order to make it on time. In the open ocean that would be no problem at all but the Tsugaro Strait is only a dozen miles wide maximum and most of it is relatively shallow…but they needed to go fast. It turned out that there is a very narrow strip more or less in the middle of the strait that is about 2 miles wide and more than 600 feet deep so what they ended up up doing was staying as shallow as they could be while still making maximum speed and they ran down the more than 600 feet deep section. As long as the ship’s depth and the ship to bottom number remained more than 600 feet they knew they didn’t have to worry about the bottom. Their transit happened on the evening and mid watches and he stayed in the control room with the fathometer (depth finder) manned and running in continuous all the way through. Luckily their inertial navigation system was very accurate and they augmented it with fixing the ship position every 15 minutes or so using the bottom contours on the chart. An exciting time to be sure but as long as the number remained more than 600 nothing to really worry about but he had pre-instructed the Officer of the Deck that if he was told go slow and go shallow to do that immediately if not sooner just in case they got out of the patch following the bottom of the canyon between the islands. Going that fast in relatively shallow water with turns every 20 minutes or so as he recalls to follow the deep water was definitely a nerve wracking 10 hours or whatever it was.

And the reason that over half the population lives in that red area…the rest of the country is pretty much mountains and of the half in the red area over half of that lives in what is known as the Kanto Plain which is the wider area at far right containing Tokyo, Yokohama, and Yokosuka.

Fukushima which is where the earthquake, tsunami, and reactor meltdown happened some years back is on the east side of Honshu in the bay just southeast of the little point that juts southward (right about the middle of the map from top to bottom on the east (right) side) of the island.

Cyas.