March 1st

Sunday, March 1st

 

Today, we had plans to tour another preserve after we attended church. Rather than backtracking to the condo to change clothes after the service was over, we dressed in our most casual attire. It was the first time Cordell has worn shorts to an inside church service.

 

 

We arrived at the Bird Rookery Swamp which is part of the 60,000-acre Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed, known as (CREW). The heart of CREW is Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary and is owned by the National Audubon Society.

 

 

First, we ate some sandwiches that we had brought with us. There were no picnic tables, so we sat on two benches while we were eating. The parking lot has signs posted warning that vultures may be attracted to rubber including linings on car doors and windows and suggested that hanging plastic shopping bags from the top of door frames or covering cars with a tarp might deter them. We did see a vulture nearby so, we found some things to hang around our car like many other people had done.

 

 

Several puzzle geocaches have been placed along the Bird Rookery Swamp Trail. Last year Barb worked long and hard on solving the puzzle by identifying birds from photos provided in the cache description. Cordell and I had found a few of the caches before we returned home in 2014. We wanted Barb visit some of these caches since she is the one who obtained the GPS coordinates that we needed to locate the hiding spots.

 

 

 

 

We had a nice walk along a portion of the trail that Cordell and I had biked last year. At one place, we saw a snake that a resident told us was a cotton mouth moccasin. Water snakes are more common in these areas and they are often mistaken for the cottonmouth, but I didn’t tarry to study the details even though it was lying off the trail.

 

 

We did see an alligator basking in the sun as we were returning to the parking lot.

 

 

 

 

 

On our drive back to the condo we stopped to find several “park and grab” caches which are very easy to find.

 

 

 

We cleaned ourselves up and then went to our favorite restaurant, Skip One, for Cordell’s delayed birthday dinner. The shrimp and oysters were outstanding, as usual.

 

 

 

We noted that a cache was hidden near the restaurant. Cordell insisted that Barb and Jim get some night geocaching experience. I was a bit leery about going into the brush in an unfamiliar area, but I figured with four of us tromping around, at least one of us stood a good chance of not being eaten up. Cordell located the cache in a tree stump and we came out with no bites—neithr animal or mosquitoes.