It was an amazing place. Part of the park was contained - in other words the animals were in captivity. However, part of the park was in the wild where the animals were free to come and go as they wish.
Just as we arrived they were starting a presentation on Manatees. The ones they had in captivity were much smaller than the ones we saw in the wild. But it was very interesting to learn so much about them.
While the Manatees were in no way trained they did learn that when the guy gets in the water he would have carrots (where he got such large carrots I'll never know) and this seemed like a favorite snack for them. They came from hundreds of yards away to get these carrots. We never saw any Manatees in the wild stick their heads out so far.
We then walked over to the part of the park that was outside any gates where the Manatees were in total freedom. While we were watching a couple did come by and did a spin (which we hadn't seen before) and we were able to see their little front fins.
Back in the first Manatee area they had an underwater viewing area. There were hundreds of fish. These were all wild and could come and go as they please. The park did nothing to entice them in and doesn't feed them in any way. But for some reason they came by the hundreds.
From there we came across Lu the hippo. As you probably know, hippos are not native to Florida. Lu was originally brought here to be in the movies. Afterwards they decided he should stay here and back in the 50's he was made a Florida resident. He is quite the character and I think to entertain himself he would do silly things to make the people laugh.
From the day we got Slugger, Mike has always said that Slugger looked like a hippo. In an odd way, he does kind of look like Lu. Poor Slugger.
When we went around the corner to the bird area, Mike's jaw dropped. There were over a hundred Flamingos. For someone that knows so much about animals this was funny. He had never seen a real Flamingo and thought they were just some statue that all the old people in Florida put in their front yards! Too funny.
I had seen Flamingo before but had no idea they were so mean. They were fighting like crazy. And when they fight they are loud. I did find a couple that were staying out of the fighting and they were bathing and stretching.
The place where the birds were was totally open to the free world. There were probably 50 different species of birds. Most of them didn't belong to the park. They just came because the atmosphere and accommodations were so nice.
The orange color in the water around this Whistling Duck is the reflection from one of the Flamingos.
I had never seen a bird colored like this. It looked like it had faded. But I guess that's just how Roseate Spoon Bill looks.
One of the more interesting birds we saw (because it is something we hadn't seen before) was a Wood Stork.
In another section of the park they had some alligators. Mike wasn't impressed as these alligators were so SMALL compared to the one he now says tried to eat him. LOL So look at these and then double it and you'll get an idea of how big the one was that started to come towards him when he was kayaking.
This is just a very small sampling of what we saw today. This place was very large and had a lot of different areas with a LOT of different animals. We took almost 500 pictures. Bet you're glad I only shared these with you!
Debbie
1/17/07
No comments:
Post a Comment