i’m sitting here on the couch looking outside and even though it’s not in the teens and bitterly cold, it’s still bleak, windy, blugh. mollie and i went running and at least she was very excited about the whole thing. i would have been perfectly happy to be wearing a stocking cap.
kevin didn’t go with us because he ran, or “shuffled,” he says, home from his class this morning, after walking to it. when mollie and i were running i kept saying to myself YOU’RE JUST SHUFFLING HERE! PICK UP YOUR FEET! GO FASTER!!!
but my feet weren’t being very cooperative.
so here are lots more pictures of key largo blue skies balmy temps. a friend of mom’s wanted to see photos of the trip and she said to go to my site and he looked at the pictures thus far and told her there were too many pelicans. hmmph. he doesn’t need to look at them if he doesn’t want to see the pelicans. damn him. i LOVE those pelicans!
this guy is an old boyfriend of mom’s and of course he just wanted to see PHOTOS OF MOM. there are photos of mom, but if he wants more photos of her he’ll just have to get them from her.
we went to the Wild Bird Sanctuary in Key Largo. it was only about a mile from our b&b and we’d tried to go the morning of the first day but the tiny parking lot was full. we went back later that day and realized we could have parked in the morning because there were at least twice as many cars crammed in.
so we waited till the next morning. this is an outdoor place where they have birds who have been injured in big cages. some have been hit by cars, some have run into power lines, others had gotten hurt by fishing hooks.
it’s kind of sad because most of this stuff has all been done by people, but it’s also uplifting because they’re taking really good care of these birds.
i’m pretty sure this is a peregrine falcon. i definitely should have taken pictures of the little descriptive signs so i’d know what they are.
a couple of owls (or wols, as i ridiculously misspelled them).
in addition to the birds in cages, there were plenty of birds walking all around. these are the only two roosters i saw.
and there were a lot of these…egrets? snowy somethings? i don’t know. kevin probably knows but right now he’s in the basement diligently practicing his piano. but they were very cool birds.
i love it that this one is twisting his neck like that.
and WOW there were lots of pelicans strutting and shuffling around all over the place.
as a worker was inside getting ready to feed the caged birds, the eager pelicans lined up, hoping for a handout. it was really funny, seeing them all there so close to us.
there were quite a few other people there looking at the birds. many people with very fancy cameras with huge long lenses. i wouldn’t want to carry around a camera that big – i like it that mine fits in my purse.
these guys, along with a bunch more, just plopped right past us – we could have petted them if we’d wanted to. i don’t know how they would have liked that, but they were amazingly tame.
mom has kind of a phobia about birds, so she is being very brave right here. the pelicans were in a big parade, marching back and forth so very near to mom and kevin.
i love this bird’s big yellow feet.
after the birds in the pen got fed, the free pelicans all flew to the top, hoping somehow they’d get down in there and get the chance to gobble up all those delicious little fishies.
this is my favorite picture. today i saw an art exhibit and there were photos that were printed on big paper. i wonder how difficult/expensive it would be to do that. probably both very.
this is a bird that goes someplace else for part of the year but always comes back to the bird sanctuary. there was a big plaque near him explaining this, but of course i didn’t take a pictures so i can give you no details at all. it’s funny, though, that he’d not just come back to the sanctuary but to the actual spot where the plaque is.
here, stan, is MOM again!
i liked it that that bird was perched right up on the peak of the information hut. the lady there said the it’s a male and he only has feathers like that during mating season.
and there are STILL MORE PHOTOS! later…
ok then,
gray monday grace.