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Courtesy of the University of North Florida
and Jack Woodward
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Dot and I went down to the Oklawaha River on Saturday. I was thinking about leaving one of the trucks at her place so we could drive down together. But we didn't and it turned out to be a good thing. If we had we would have missed all the really neat things we saw.
Like these two youngsters. We were only about 10 minutes into the paddle and we came across these two gators. They were only about 3 feet long.
We thought this was pretty funny. The gator on the right has his tail on top of the turtle. Only Heaven knows how they got into this position. We suspect the turtle was there first and said to the gator, "No, I'm not moving. I was here first. Besides, I'm bigger than you."
You can tell from the size of the turtle that these two gators are pretty small.
Here was our second treat for the day. We had seen this large bird fly up into the trees near some fishermen. Dot asked them if that was a hawk or what. They said it was an owl. They threw fish into the air and the owl swooped down to get them. The owl then flew across the river and we followed it. It joined another owl on a branch and was soon joined by a third owl. Apparently it was mom and pop and their youngster. We watched them for about 15 minutes before they finally all flew off. But it sure was neat to see.
We didn't see many large birds at all. We think it was because there were so many boaters on the water. For that matter we didn't see any large gators at all.
But we did see a few of these. As we learned from our Okefenokee outing, this is a prothonotary warbler. These ones were very small compared to the ones we saw at Okefenokee.
It is a pretty river to paddle on.
This is back on a side channel.
While we were heading back from this side channel, I spotted these guys on a log. At first I thought they were iguana type lizards because of their size. It turned out to be very young gators, still babies.
This is one of my new toys, a battery powered remote controlled boat. And this thing is a speed demon for being battery powered. It kicks up a pretty good sized rooster tail and goes between 15 to 20 mph.
Remember to click twice on the white triangle, not double-click, but click twice.
To replay the video you have to wait until the end of the video, then, in the bottom left corner it says CLOSE. Yeah I know at this small resolution it's heard to read. But if you click on the 'word' in the bottom left hand part of the screen, you can replay the video.