Feb. 10, 2019 - Florida - Interesting and Unusual photos

While we were driving around St. George Island, Diana and I saw this dead tree with its roots totally exposed. All the sand surrounding the roots has been washed away. This is an interesting look at how the roots of a tree develop and anchor it to the ground.

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We’ve seen several Anoles here at the house we are renting. As we left the house one day, this one scampered from the deck on to a vertical post in the railing. It stayed completely still, and I’ll bet it thought that flattening itself against the post kept it hidden from us.

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I lifted the lid on our outdoor trash can one day and discovered this tiny frog. It is only about an inch and a half long. I used an app called iNaturalist to take a photo and submit it for identification. Very quickly, several people wrote back and said it is a Squirrel Tree Frog.

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As I was taking photos along the Gulf of Mexico shore, a family showed me this Lightning Welk that they found in the water. They didn’t know what it was, so I identified it for them and told them a little bit about it. They agreed to let me take some photos. I wish I would have taken a photo of someone holding it so you could see how big it was. I estimate that it was 8 to 10 inches long. I searched the Internet and found that it takes from ten to twenty years for a Welk to grow that large.

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Here’s a top view of the Lightning Welk. The black part is the animal that is living in the shell. As it grows, it makes the shell larger in a spiral shape. It would have started out as the tiny piece at the center of the spiral, so you can see it has added a lot of shell over the years. The hard, thin piece on top of the animal is called the operculum. The animal can pull itself completely inside the shell and then the operculum covers the opening of the shell. The little girl with the family was delighted to be the one who put the Welk back in the water.

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Peacocks? In Florida? I was birding at a local park one morning when I heard a loud bird call I didn’t recognize. After searching around, I finally discovered the source of the sound. There were several Peacocks in a nearby yard. It was obviously not a wild bird, so I couldn’t add it to my list. The correct name for this species is Indian Peafowl. Male birds in the chicken family are often called cocks, hence the name most people use is Peacock.

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