Life, An Education--Part IV

My favorite part of our trip!

We really had no idea how much we would fall in love with this day!

If you take a close look at this map you can see where we were....and you can see why we made the decision that afternoon to do what I will share in our next blog...

Before we began our hike...we took a picture of I'm hoping it's a panther. The problem with waiting almost 3 months to blog about a trip is that you forget so much! Well, my 41 year old mind does!

This is Michael's favorite thing to do in the whole world...bird watch and hike! When I fell in love with him in NJ, I fell in love with those very same things!

Anhinga - otherwise known as a piano bird...can you tell why?

The first trail we hiked was called Anhinga Trail...there were hundreds of Anhingas and another animal that begins with an "A"!

OH...misplaced picture...oops...moving these pictures around Blogger is a pain...here we are on the first leg of our hike..notice something here...each of us are have binoculars hanging on our necks and our Everglades Journal in our hands.

Here is the other "A" animal. Tons and tons of alligators. I really wanted to see wild alligators. I know we can see them in our own back yards, but I haven't yet, so this was one of my favorite sightings.

But as you can see from the picture below...we totally got our fill of alligators. I mean they were everywhere!

This really was breath taking. I took about 15 pictures of alligators. I just love them! They fascinate me.

I love that my husband and boys really bonded during this trip. (Not that they weren't bonded before.) I homeschool them, so they get their fill of Mom, this was uninterrupted time with Dad and it was awesome. Kyle in the above picture has always loved nature. He loves animals and he can totally see things we don't see all the time (attention to detail)! He knows how to use his binocs and spot the birds, just like his Dad. I loved this moment!

Here we are on another trail (I forgot the name of it)! This was awesome...we were in the dirt..I desperately wanted to see an alligator come up on our path (well, kind of..I mean I didn't want it to eat my children or anything, but....I know...I think I've seen too much Man Vs. Wild on Discovery Channel.

We read about trees indigenous to South Florida and saw watering holes for animals. It was very educational!

I was smart when I took this picture because I knew I wouldn't remember the name of this tree...so I told Brendan to strangle himself...this is a strangler tree! Look at the way it grew up and around itself. Fascinating.

So I had tons of pictures, but these gave a few highlights of this part of our trip. The above picture was perplexing to us. Being bird lovers we were a little disturbed by this. This was an actual turkey vulture hanging from a tree. We thought perhaps it got tangled in some wire or something, but then as we walked around we saw several of them hanging. They were purposefully hung there (after they had been found dead) to deter other turkey vultures from hanging around. They have such a problem with the vultures in the Everglades, they are so numerous and they apparently are attracted to the black molding in cars. There have been several incidents of car damage do to the vultures. So they are hung as a warning to the other vultures of potential danger. Interesting huh??

Next step of our vacation is the last step...The Florida Keys.