Saturday March 30th 2024

Add a few clouds and a little less wind to yesterday’s weather and you get today’s weather. It was a beautiful weather day with a high temperature in the low eighties.

I really got a slow start to the day. It was afternoon before I left my RV home. I expected to find a very busy state park and that is more or less what I found. The nature of the activity in the park was what surprised me. There weren’t as many cars going up and down the main road or flooding the parking lots at the turnouts, but there were plenty of people gathered in the picnic areas and pavilions. The big pavilion near the front of the park was even setup for something fancy. The picnic tables were all moved aside and rented round tables complete with white table cloths and chairs setup in there place. There weren’t a lot of people around, so I don’t have any idea what was going to happen. More significantly it was already 3PM when I saw the setup. Who knows when the event was happening. Maybe it’s tomorrow.

The alligators were more active today. There were a few taking the sun on the river bank, but there were also more gators than usual swimming at a good pace in the river. Seeing an alligator head in the water watching the shoreline is common, but watching an alligator reposition up or down river at a good pace is a more unusual sight. Today I watched a big gator come down river right to where I was standing safely on the bank. It stopped and watched a space on the bank just a little down river from my location. What it expected to find is a mystery. I’m confident it wasn’t me.

Today was a day for great blue heron sightings. I saw at least six today. Usually I don’t see more than one or two. All of the great blue heron are in their matting plumage. A few extra feathers and colors make them an even more interesting bird to take pictures of.