I know, I know, it's like I fell off the face of the internet. Short version: new day job, long hours, successful craft and art shop. No time to blog. In fact, very little time to shoot.
But I made the time to get down to Florida while I could this week and I'm doing as much shooting as humanly possible in my four and a half days down here.
Yesterday we went to an amazing place called The Octogon. No, it has nothing to do with Mixed Martial Arts... but I'll talk about them later.
Today was Corkscrew Swamp. Corkscrew is part of the Everglades and is a pretty amazing place with wildlife unlike anything you get to see in the great 'wilderness' of Chicago.
So I'm going to start off with a few of the highlights from what I saw today.
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| White Marked Tussock Moth Caterpilar (044 - 2012) |
This is a
White-Marked Tussock Moth Caterpillar. He's kind of creepy-cute, but that's pretty deceptive... he's venomous. Not poisonous (meaning you get sick only if you eat it), but venomous. Don't pet him!
There were a great
many of them down a particular sub-path on the boardwalk. We had to be
careful where we leaned over the railings that we didn't get got!
Just a quick little video of them scampering along the wood. It's only 11 seconds.
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| White-Tailed Deer (045 - 2012) |
These deer were adorable! They were so small we thought at first they were Key Deer, but Key Deer actually only live on the, you know, Florida Keys. So they're White-Tailed Deer, according to the checklist you can download from the site's website. Anyway there were a couple of them out in the grasses. This one stayed pretty close to us. Here she's looking at me like, "Really, I'm eating here. Do you have to watch?"
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| Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (046 - 2012) |
One last critter for this post. A great big, very bright yellow-orange grasshopper! An Eastern Lubber Grasshopper to be exact.
He was pretty mellow about us walking around him and taking pictures of him. I love that if you look carefully (and, you know, blow the picture up to full size), you can see his mandibles folded up against his face!
So there's three quick new species for this trip. I have oh so terribly many more pictures to sort, edit and post. This is barely even a drop in a bucket. But hey, I have to start somewhere!
There were a great
many of them down a particular sub-path on the boardwalk. We had to be
careful where we leaned over the railings that we didn't get got! 
We've got tons of white tailed deer here in KS, it's always amazing seeing them. Once in Wichita I got to sit and watch a doe and her fawn in a field for about half an hour. The downside is they tend to jump in front of traffic, so they're always turning up dead on the interstate and damaging cars, but they are lovely creatures.
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