Back to Normal, Whatever That Is! and Gator NEWS

Sparky is back to bike riding, and has been seeing some pretty wonderful things. You can see them on Facebook sometimes, but it's good to put them in the blog, too. Some day, we hope to have the blog printed in book form, it's gonna take a LOT of chapters and quite a few books to print! That's the affordable way, to do it in chunks, like 6 months at a time....

It's full bore summer now, here in Bradenton/Sarasota...We are getting rain at least three times a week or more, which SOMETIMES brings down the temps, and other times all it does is bring up the humidity. Lows are in the mid seventies at night, and low nineties during the day. It's supposed to be the rainy season. Sparky would love for it to rain all day long, but that's not the pattern here. Storms blow in and blow out. It can be raining in INCHES ten minutes from our house, and be sunny in our backyard. If it does rain, it seldom rains for more than a half hour or less and it's done.  We have an alarm sound that goes off on the golf course when there's lightning, because our backyard is on a golf course. So we hear THAT almost every day. If you are on the golf course, you are supposed to get off and come in immediately, but people don't. When the danger of lightning has passed, there is a second alarm that Sparky insists sounds like, "Bee-doh, bee-doh". That's the "all clear".  We get a LOT of lightning in this area. So it's great that there's a warning system in place. Now if only people heeded that! Sparky enabled the lightning alert on her phone from a weather app after reading lightning can strike a distance as much as ten miles from a cloud! And since Florida is the "lightning capital" of the country, or so they say, it's a good idea to have that, she thinks. But after using it and seeing the amount of time lapsed between the strike and the alert on the phone can be more than a couple of minutes most times, Sparky thought it wasn't worth using. Eldy thinks Sparky needs a gator alert on her phone, haha....

Speaking of gators..... A gator grabbed a 75 pound black lab from the Hillsborough River in a park near Tampa, did the death roll with him while his owner was watching and screaming for help, and the dog was never seen again.  That was sad.....

Sparky saw this gator with his mouth open on one of her rides this week and this time, she was farther away...Wisely, she used her zoom...He was between two marshes in Lakewood Ranch, the area Sparky likes to ride to and does her 15 miles round trip at least three times a week to and from her house. There's usually some kind of action going on, and some kind of wildlife to see.....

Sparky saw this smaller gator just a few feet from her on a bike ride a couple of days ago as she was just starting out. She was up on the sidewalk, the ditch with the gator was just a few feet below her. He wasn't hungry, wasn't moving, he was just trying to keep cool. The ditch was located right next to a car wash in a shopping plaza.

The other day, Sparky saw a roseate spoonbill (her favorite Florida bird, says E.) looking for bugs near a marsh. She witnessed a VERY large gator come up out of the water and onto the bank about 50 yards from the spoonbill. He then rose up on his legs (that's running mode for a gator)--it was very evident he had a plan that the spoonbill was going to be his lunch. As Sparky came closer, still VERY far away from the pair) he caught a glimpse of her and whipped around so fast and hightailed back into the water. The spoonbill flew to the opposite side of the marsh. Whew! Here he is, safe! Guess that's why he let his photo be taken....

Another morning, Sparky saw TWO LIVE armadillos. They are almost always dead ones when you see them, being devoured by vultures, so it was great to see what they look like when they are alive...Ugly but kind of cute, too. They are like little jackhammers with their heads. Rat-a-tat-tat, hammering the soil for bugs.

How about a nice little blue heron? We see them all the time, but they are still pretty in the early morning light....

He kept an eye on Sparky while she slowly strolled by......

One of our latest trips to the Anna Maria Island City Pier netted us a photo of a great blue heron with a fishing lure stuck in his chest. It doesn't seem to bother him in the least which is good.. Almost like he's wearing bling and proud of it, like those old guys who wear big bulky gold chain necklaces..Ugh.

Here it is close up....He even has been given a nickname. The fishermen call him--wait for it--"Bling".

Lots of birds out at the pier that day, coming in for remnants of the fishermen's catch and escapees.

And that's the latest from the "Bird Lady" of Bradenton....hahaha......Sparky probably should be called "Gator Lady" with all the gator photos she likes to take! Oh, well....See you next time.....