Bezabor: Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Wekiwa Springs, Birds-of-Prey Center (posted from Panera Bread, Ocala)

Wednesday, March 15-
As we drove back the four-mile sand road to our campsite yesterday, we noticed an approaching front and even had a few sprinkles of rain. We’ve not had any rain since leaving home, which has been a surprise. Back home I had signed onto wunderground.com and checked the archive for weather for this area last March and saw that it appeared to rain every three or four days.
In any case, I welcomed the front. The temps in St. Augustine and Titusville areas had been getting into the high eighties and low nineties during the day and not cooling off very quickly in the evenings. Two nights ago at the Wal-mart in Titusville, it was still above 80 degrees when we went to bed at 2100—that’s too hot when you want to keep the doors closed and just look like another vehicle parked in the lot.
But the front was bringing a fresh breeze yesterday afternoon and that made for a wonderful afternoon and evening. But it also brought surprisingly cold weather. When I woke briefly in the middle of the night it was 37.4 degrees. But by 0830 it was nearly 50 and rising fast. We decided it was too windy to kayak, though, so we decided to take the Florida Trail south to Buck Lake and get a look around. We left at 0930, Labashi in a light jacket and both of us in long pants. But the sun was bright and the sky was a perfect blue and along the trail we had enough protection from the wind that we started to overheat in the first hour. By the time we got to Buck Lake it was time for me to zip off the pant legs and for Labashi to go topless (down to her sports-bra, silly!) and don her shorts. While we were cooling off we saw movement near the lake and there were two beautiful sandhill cranes. They looked big enough to look you in the eye and had spectacular red eye-patches that lit up in the bright sun. Labashi took a few photos and finally spooked them as she got too close. And as we watched them gracefully fly away we noticed a small hawk coming toward us, a snake in its talons, struggling with the wildly-wriggling snake. Very cool. We hiked back to camp via the sand road and checked the time—we had been out four hours.
We spent the afternoon around the campsite, reading the bird guide, the maps and brochures, and blogging and just taking it easy. Then we joined the communal campfire for an hour or so before going to bed. Temps are expected to be in the mid-thirties again tonight but they are still hold in the Fifties by bedtime.

Tuesday, March 14-
On the way out of the Kelly Park campground this morning, the attendant who gave us the ‘unavailable’ site told Labashi not to tell anybody about the park. We weren’t too sure what that was about but suspect that the locals try to keep the park for locals; it’s too close to Orlando and could be over-run by ‘foreigners’. For some reason she was willing to share the sec
We then drove over to the Audubon Birds of Prey Center in Maitland. This turned out to be a great place to visit. We were first in today and shortly after entering a specialist came out and brought out a bald eagle and then a barred owl for us to see up close. The eagle was named ‘Trouble’ and had had a deformity of its beak and, although it had extensive repair work done to the beak, it continues to be a problem because it, like fingernails, continues to grow and in it’s case, grow in such a manner that would cause it to eventually not be able to feed.
We spent the next several hours checking out all the birds which, because of the nature of their injuries, could not be released back to the wild. We were amazed at the variety of birds and hope the Center continues to thrive.
We then headed north, back toward the Ocala National Forest since we have an event to attend this weekend. We stopped at Alexander Springs to see if we could arrange for a reverse re-haul like we had done at Juniper Springs but learned they are temporarily not doing any shuttling—the dirt road is washed out and they have to await repair by the Forest Service.
So we headed back to Farle’s Lake where we knew we’d be able to get a site and we could see some of the folks we had met last time we were there. We made the mistake of taking a smaller sand road (#538) instead of taking the longer hard-road way around. As it turned out, the shortcut was the long way around. About a third of the way in the road narrowed to two-track. Then the branches started closing in. With our higher-than-normal size with the kayaks atop we soon started sweeping aside hitting smaller branches and I was afraid we’d come to one too large to sweep aside and I’d have to back out a couple of miles of two-track or risk trying to turn around at a wider spot but possibly one with soft sand under the pine needles. We also started hitting whoop-dee-do’s, which are potholes that at first look big enough to swallow Mocha Joe but when you right up to them they aren’t that bad--- so long as the whoops are dried out and don’t have a soft-sand bottom. For the most part we were on yellow sand. We did come to a few twenty-yard stretches white sand the locals call “sugar sand” and they looked like they could be trouble but so long as I kept up my momentum, we went through okay. By the time we made it to the hard road, we were very happy to see it and I bypassed another ‘shortcut’

Charley (“the Maine-iac”) had left this morning but Henry and Jane from east of Toronto and Cy and Bonnie from northern Michigan were still there. And after we settled in a new guy, ‘Mark’ also known as “Tie-Dye”, came over to visit. He’s called Tie-Dye because he tie-dyes women’s dresses and sells them at folk festivals and blues festivals and has been doing so since the Sixties. Mark is a very interesting guy and we sat and talked for two hours before winding down. He told us about some of his favorite authors and books about Florida, particularly about the Florida Cracker culture.
After supper we joined the communal campfire at Henry-and-Jane’s site and another newbie was there. He was ‘Murph’ and turned out to be a former folksinger, “back in the Sixties,” he said. He had his guitar and a ditty-bag with seven harmonicas and he would sing a few songs, then Jane-the-Netherlander would play her harmonica rendition of “My Country ‘tis of Thee”. Then Murph would play a few more Jimmy Buffett, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, or Smothers Brothers songs, and then Jane would again tear into “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”. Ah, Florida… what a great place!

Monday, March 13-
Today we headed back inland. We went directly west from Titusville into the outskirts of Orlando where I stopped and did a search on Street Atlas Plus for any Starbucks. I found there was one in Winter Park which was on the way (sort of…) to Maitland where I wanted to visit the Birds of Prey Center, a raptor rehabilitation facility. We had some difficulty locating the center so called them for directions but learned that they were closed Mondays (which wasn’t in the guidebook!). We decided we’d try to stay at Wekiwa Springs State Park which is nearby so we’d be able to see the facility tomorrow but the campground was full. But they gave us directions to Kelly Park, a county campground about six miles away so we gave that a try. At Kelly Park, we once again saw the “Sorry, campground is full” sign but given our experiences with those signs, we asked anyway. The attendant at first said that the campground was full so we asked whether they had an overflow area or any other out-of-the-way area since we don’t need any hookups and just need a parking place for the night. The attendant then told us to pull over and come inside and proceeded to give us a campsite—we don’t know why but suspect she normally gives campsites to locals only but for some reason pitied us today.
After finding our very nice site, we drove back to Wekiwa Springs State Park and entered as day users. We walked the Wet-to-Dry trail which explains the differences between a hydric (wet) hammock and an upland hammock and walked an hour or so on the white-blazed trail. We then went back to our campground to relax but when supper time came around I suggested we try a Melting Pot fondue restaurant we had passed near the interstate. We had tried to get into a Melting Pot in Towson a few months ago and were unsuccessful so this was our chance to give it a try. Naturally we over-ate and over-spent but we enjoyed the restaurant. I’ve got to go back to try the chocolate fondue dessert, however; we didn’t have room this time.


Sunday, March 12-
After another Wal-mart night in Titusville, we spent all day today in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. We walked the Palm Hammock Trail (about two miles) to start our day, then spent the next several hours driving the Peacock’s Pocket dike roads, looking for gators and birds. We quickly started seeing wildlife. First, we saw a gator or two in the canal paralleling the road and noticed something that looked like the back end of a gator but we couldn’t make sense of the front end. As we watched, there was movement and it turned out that we were watching a momma gator with two tiny babies across her snout. The babies swam away a bit and momma positioned herself between us and the babies and gave us a full profile, as if to say “Come any closer and you’ll have ME to deal with”. A short distance down the road we came to a car pulled off along the road and some birders out with their scope set up on a tripod. They were looking at one of the three bald eagle nests on this giant refuge. In the nest were two adults and an eaglet. Further along we started seeing many alligators, most lying partially out of the water. We could stop almost anywhere and either see a couple of alligators immediately or just wait a minute and you’d see the telltale eyes-and-snout shape pop up somewhere nearby. A little further along we saw birds--- lots of sandpipers and plovers, limpkins, American coots, common gallinules, white ibises, and great blue, white, and green herons. We then stopped at the visitor’s center a second time and walked the visitor’s center boardwalk where we saw a softshell turtle, several other large swimming turtles, and a pig frog. We then drove out to wildlife drive area which had been closed earlier in the day for a prescribed burn, this time trying to follow directions we had found in the visitor’s center for an upcoming event to see a great horned owl’s nest. We never did find the nest but blundered into an active fire area. It was fascinating to watch the fire advance with the swirling winds. Some fifty yards away the fire was roaring up and consuming palms while closer to us it just seemed to steadily advance with a small flare-up when it would consume a bush or grass clump. We weren’t sure whether to report the fire but it soon became clear that this was just some minor left-over from the prescribed burn—we even saw a firetruck go by later and ignore the flare-up.
We then headed down a dirt road trying to find another eagle’s nest and soon came upon a red ribbon tied onto roadside bushes. By scanning the tree line we soon found the nest but this one was empty.
We then took a walk of a little over a mile on the Scrub Ridge Trail which wound through a burned-over area and we tried to guess when the burn had been done since there was now some green growth. We guessed the burn had been done about a year to fifteen months ago.
We continued on to the Manatee Observation Deck on Haulover Canal. We asked if any manatees had been seen and a fellow there said he had seen four in the last half-hour and they were close to the dock. We stayed forty minutes or so but never saw one and the fellow who told us we’d see one any minute now left abruptly, feeling a little foolish, we believe, for his predictions.
It was now nearing dusk but we thought we’d like to see the sunset over the water so we took Shiloh Marsh Road, another dirt road leading back to the dikes. We drove for ten miles or so, passing a few fishermen along the way and not quite sure where we were going. Then we came upon two fishermen and a woman who flagged us down—their battery was dead. As we set up the jumper cables to give them a jump we asked about where the road came out and it soon became clear we’d better turn around and go out the way we had come in—otherwise we were in for miles and miles of traveling on the narrow little dirt road with water on both sides and the refuge closed. So we turned around and followed the now-very-relieved fisherfolks back out to the main road. We drove back to Titusville, where we stopped at a Papa John’s Pizza to get a pizza to enjoy in the van. We then spent another night at the Titusville Wal-mart.