Florida: J.N. Ding Darling National Park, Feb 7, 2019

On Thursday morning we headed from the hotel to the next stop on our Florida trip (see here): J.N. Ding Darling National Park. This is an awesome place! All of the stops our Florida trip were great and I don’t regret any one of them, but this was the highlight for me. There were so many different species of birds, and they were all accessible from stops along the Wildlife Road. We also hiked a portion of the Indigo Trail.

I was hoping to see the Roseate Spoonbill on this trip, and we finally saw it here. Some other highlights were the Wood Stork, the Yellow-crowned Night Heron, the Reddish Egret, and the Little Blue Heron.

The Reddish Egret exhibits a dance-like behavior when hunting for fish. It runs about in the water erratically, changing direction abruptly, going in circles, and stopping to put up its wings like an umbrella, presumably to shade the water for better fishing. It has earned the nickname the ‘dancing egret’. Unfortunately, most of the time we observed that behavior was when the sun was behind the bird, so the lighting wasn’t great, but I included some pictures. It was fun to watch him. If you’re interested in video of the ‘dancing Egret’, there are a bunch of youtube videos – for an example of one, see here.

We spent the morning at Ding Darling NP, had lunch, and then headed to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, which will be the topic of my next post.

I had a hard time paring down all the pictures, so I included more than I usually do.