Month: April 2012

On our recent trip to Caladesi Island, I tried to do a better job of taking photos than I usually do. The birding wasn’t great when we were there, so I had time to take some photos of plants.

Some of my attempts at photography were pretty mixed, as seen in this attempted close-up shot:

This plant I didn’t want to get too close to, but the photo turned out fine anyway. Cute little flowers.

I had more luck with some of the smaller plants. This lupine was pretty- a patch of it was blooming along the trail, with bees buzzing all around:

Then there were some tiny succulents along dips in the trail:

I’m not sure about the identification about some of these the species we saw. I think the pines were longleaf pines, but I’m not 100% sure. Here’s a young one:

Then there was one shrub that I though would be really easy to identify from the photos, and apparently is not. It was growing along the trail next to buttonwood and mangrove, so I’m assuming there was a fair amount of brackish groundwater there. These look like pretty old flowers. At first, I thought the yellow parts were a keel-like structure, as in the Fabaceae (pea family), but now that I look at the photo again, it looks like there are some shriveled up petals in there too. So I’m drawing a blank on this one. Any suggestions?

Over Spring Break, we took a day trip to Caladesi Island, which is a barrier island just north of Clearwater Beach. The island has a dynamic history- it was originally connected to what is now the further-north Honeymoon Island, but a 1921 hurricane dug a channel between the two islands, separating them. Then a 1985 hurricane created a sandbar connecting Caladesi to Clearwater Beach. So technically, it’s not really an island at the present.

Both Caladesi and Honeymoon Islands contain state parks– you can drive to Honeymoon, and Caladesi is accessible by ferry from there. We took the ferry over in the morning, and did some hiking and hanging out on the beach before heading back.

The trails in the island’s interior go through some scrub areas, as well as longleaf pine forest and mangroves. It was cool enough that we weren’t being blasted in the sun, though the shady forest trail was definitely refreshing. We actually got a bit of rain off and on, which was fine.

Florida’s an interesting place to hike, because you have really dry, sandy soil that supports different vegetation communities with really small changes in elevation. While most of the trail was dry, there were muddy areas with mangroves and wetland plants in places where the ground dipped down only a few feet.

The scrub areas were perfect for gopher tortoises, and sure enough, we saw one munching away on grass near the trail. It seemed pretty used to people- we stopped and mutually stared at one another for a while, then it went on eating away. Maybe it was hungry after the morning’s rain.

We also got to see a halo around the sun, which was pretty cool. I wasn’t sure this photo would turn out, but it shows up pretty well. (For more on halos, sun dogs, and other types of atmospheric phenomena, click on that link. That website is a really cool resource.)

All in all, it was a good way to relax and unwind before getting back to work.