Wednesday March 10th 2021

Today’s weather was another incremental change from Tuesday. It was a few degrees warmer into the high seventies, but otherwise a full repeat complete with the northeast wind.

I visited another of the area preserves today. This time drove into the middle of Sarasota to visit Red Bug Slough Preserve. The name is certainly unique. It is 72 acres of undeveloped land with hardwood and pine forests around ponds and drainage areas dredged from swampy creeks. It serves two purposes. The biggest use is as a recreation area, but its biggest value may be as a flood control area.

There is a small playground, picnic tables, trails for walking, running and biking along with the possibility of catching fish in the parks ponds. The trails are not well marked. They seem to go every which way, but you can’t get lost the entire area is surrounded by roads and housing developments. Most of the people that use the park come from the nearby homes. There is only one small dirt parking area.

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I spent a couple of hours waking the trail and watching the wildlife in the pond. All of the pictures in this blog entry came from the preserve. I saw lots of turtles and a few water birds. There were plenty of warnings about alligators, but I didn’t see any today. By far the most common animal were the dogs getting walked by their people. Some of the alligator warning signs were design to keep the dog walkers out of the most alligator prone areas.

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