MY JEEP IS TEN! HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY!

My baby is ten years old!

A rare photo of me NOT at the helm of my JEEP.

Over the past ten years, she has patiently tried to teach 3 children the art of the stick shift ... with varying results.

She's taken me to awesome places ... which we don't tear up.
She's a responsible offroader.

On occasion, she has been filled with pretty, intelligent,funny college girls.

More often, it's just JEEP and me, lost where we want to be ...

Out here on the edge of Florida, we do things ourselves and she has often pitched in to make things happen.

She loves my dogs and I love her for that too. SHE never fusses about dog hair on her seats.



Her cargo space is small, but Bear fits, even with Coquina, so it's all good.



Sure, she had a close call this year, but she never flinched.
It's a JEEP thing, you might not understand.

... and she always has my back.

It's been ten years since I left mini-van purgatory and achieved a life-long dream of having a JEEP.

I have no desire to EVER own another vehicle.

Driving an American Legend works for me just fine.

Happy Tenth, you awesome thing!

Bufflehead

A Tale Of Ospreys, Power Companies, Schools and Cooperation.

This is a tale of ospreys, school districts, and power companies ...

For the 25 years that I have called Levy County home, there have been ospreys using an old light pole, in the old ball field at the Cedar Key School. The weathered old pole sits on the edge of the school property, sandwiched between an open ball field/parking area and the salt marsh.

I don't know when the lights atop the pole quit working and that's not important here anyway. The important thing is the old pole has been used by ospreys for years.

Our story, my part of it at least, begins last Tuesday during the teacher preplanning week. As I was passing through the front office, our sweet office ladies asked me to take some photos of the osprey nest for the district office.

Hmmmm ... that seemed odd... so, I asked...

"What do they want them for?"

"They need them for a nest removal permit. They're taking down the old light poles."

"Why? That nest has been there for a couple of decades at least."

The answer involved safety, and at a school with precious children, it is hard to argue on the other side of safety. It seemed that the old lamps and some of the wooden supports were dangling and could fall.

Of course I volunteered to get those photos, because emailing them to the district office would allow me to put my two cents in on why we should keep the vertical pole so the ospreys could eventually use it again.

The power company, Central Florida Electric Cooperative, was right about the safety issue as you can see from the photo above. The nest, inactive at this time of year, is just on the other side of this view of the pole.


I walked out across the field, shot 4 different views of the osprey pole and then returned to my classroom. I attached the photos to an email, made a case for replacing the pole top with a nest platform citing the longevity of the nest site and how it was a part of our school.
The last thing I did before clicking "SEND" was to blind copy my new school principal who was away that day at training.

CLICK ... and the email shot out into the ether.

Later that day, I got a "thank you for the photos" from the district office and nothing more.
No response to my suggestions.

Uh oh.

A little after that, I got a very positive response from my principal after she received her copy of the email.

I was out the next morning for a dental appointment and I did not see my principal until after lunch.

The osprey pole was in the back of my mind, bouncing around as I planned my second round of email osprey diplomacy.

And then my principal popped into my classroom and informed me that she had been working that morning to save the nesting pole and that she had been successful.

We would either get the old pole with the dangerous dangly stuff cut off, or a brand new pole.

"YES!"
I high-fived her ... couldn't help myself.




The "new pole" angle was due to a certain school district employee with strong Cedar Key ties who was really pushing for a brand new pole that would last a long time, rather than the old weathered one that had been in the ground for decades.

Late last week this was the scene as "Operation Osprey" got underway. In the photo above, the old pole has been topped and is yet to be extracted.
The brand new pole is on the trailer waiting to be installed.

In this photo, the Central Florida Electric truck is shaking the old pole to loosen it in a technique familiar to anyone who has ever pulled an old fence post out of the ground.
Shake, pull, shake, pull ...

I worked late that day, but left out of the front entrance to the school so I didn't see their handy-work until I went in Sunday to do a little pro-bono planning before the kids start Monday.

When I walked around back, this is what I found.

The pole was up AND the Central Florida Electric folks had installed cross bars and a makeshift platform ... with some nesting material as bait.

WOO HOO!

Here's a view of the entire new pole. Just behind the thin band of trees is the salt marsh.

Awesome job CFEC!

This month I'm paying my electric bill with a smile.

If I were a hash tagging kind of guy, you might see things like:
#awesomenewprincipal
#waytogocentralfloridaelectriccooperative
#thanksdistrictguy
#letshearitforinteragencyinterspeciescooperation

It was a good week at Cedar Key School, folks, a very good week.

COME SCALLOPING WITH US! GOPRO UNDERWATER VIDEO BONUS!

It didn't look good as we crossed over the Apalachicola River a few weeks ago. We were heading west to St. Joe Bay to spend some time at our friend's BEAUTIFUL bay house.

Our goal was to stay as wet as possible for a few days, snorkeling, fishing, and of course ... scalloping.

We did all those things of course, and we did stay wet, but it wasn't all saltwater wetness as we had hoped for. Each day brought heavy grey clouds, blowing squalls, and just to shake things up ... brief interludes of bright sunshine.

Of course, we didn't let a little ominous weather stop us. Repeatedly, kayaks and canoes were launched from "The Bay House" on foraging missions.

Most of these were successful.

A few words about scalloping in case you have never been...

• You need a saltwater fishing license.
• Pay attention to the seasons and the limits. Go to Myfwc.com for details.
• In some shallow areas, people walk and pick them up, but generally this is a snorkeling activity in 6 feet or less of water.
• Port St. Joe down to Crystal River is the part of Florida where scalloping is done/
• Bring mask, fins, snorkel, dive flag, and a mesh bag or you'll wind up stuffing your pockets as you snorkel.

At one point, I wound up with 33 scallops in my bathing suit pockets because my mesh bag was in the wrong canoe.

These are the target... "Bay Scallops".
They lie about in the seagrass beds and filter plankton out of the water. You may find some strays out in the sandy patches with no grass, but most will be in the grass.

Scalloping isn't rocket science, but it's almost as much fun.

You just snorkel along, enjoying the scenery and sea life until you spot a scallop on the bottom or perched up on the grass.

Then you grab it.

Easy peasy... but ... I have to tell you about what comes next.

Being a successful scallop predator means you now have to clean them.

There is a shopvac method which seems so much like cheating that I will not even discuss it here.

Better to cement your hunter-gatherer clan bonds by sitting down together and cleaning the kill.

Traditional American scallop consumption involves only the white adductor muscle that opens and closes the two shells. So unlike oysters, muscles, and clams, we discard the visceral mass (body) of the scallop for that one white muscle.

Don't ask me why, I'm just going to answer "tradition".

One of these days, I'm going to eat the whole thing and see if it's a flavor thing. I doubt it since some cultures eat the entire thing.

The prize.
You can go Google "how to clean scallops" or you can marry someone who grew up doing it like I did.
There are a few tricks to it, but it's not difficult once you do a few.

(That last sentence above refers to cleaning scallops not marriage)

At the end of the day, the guts and shells went back into the bay much to the delight of the pinfish who swarmed the pile of shells and cleaned them of every speck of flesh in minutes.


As usual, when I stick my head beneath the waters of my beloved Florida, I take the GoPro camera.

The video below is a 5 minute edited version of some of the better video clips and it shows among other things, scalloping technique, me scaring the bejeezus out of my son, and a creepy crab encounter.

Enjoy!


 

POND UPDATE! SHE'S BACK!

Regular Pure Florida readers know that my pond goes up and down and that I "tweak" it from time to time. The last major tweaking I did was in the 2011-2012 winter when I excavated the then dry pond bottom.

 

The photo above shows the excavation in progress. By the time it was over, I had created 3 shallow basins with dikes made of the excavated pond sediments.

As always, I had my digging expert supervise the excavation process. In the photo above, Bear is standing directly in front of the unseen dock. Keep that in mind for later in this post ... you might want to flip back to this picture to compare full vs. empty pond.

The basins worked as I had hoped. During several periods of rain that were intense enough to saturate the pond bottom, but not intense enough to fill the pond, they provided refuge for minnows, tadpoles, and aquatic insects.
Without these basins, the rainfall would have spread out over the flat pond bottom in a thin layer that would have quickly evaporated.

The sticks projecting up from the pond bottom are dead dog fennel stems. During a dry period, the entire pond bottom was one big fragrant forest of feathery dog fennel plants.

Note: The supervisor in THIS photo is little Coquina.

During the spring, some rains teased us (and the frogs) with the promise of fulfillment, but alas, even when the waters crept up and out of the basins, it was only temporary.

They soon receded ... to the point that in May 2013, even the basins dried up and I did an emergency gambusia minnow rescue operation transferring thousands to the safety of an aquaculture tank in the back yard.

Here is the pond this morning, 8 August 2013.
That's right ... go ahead and say it ...WOW!

The long view.

The water is dark and clear.
The green on top is duckweed. You can almost hear it multiplying if you stand quietly and listen. The water is brimming with tadpoles, but not brimming with bream as it is almost completely fishless at the moment.

I have mosquito fish (Gambusia) in it to control skeeters, but so far I have not stocked it with bigger fish.

I will stock it since it's up nice and high and hurricane season has really just barely begun, so I think it will stay full for a while.

For now, I am giving the amphibians a head start on their family planning. Tadpole survival is much higher in a fishless pond, so they need to get while the getting is good.

And yes, I do check it for alligators now that it is a real pond again. Weekly night shines for red eyes. Only once in two decades has a gator shown up in the pond and he was shown the door to a creek about ten miles from here.

So there you go, a pond update, ... because I know you were wondering ...

PREHISTORIC CUTENESS: A BABY HORSESHOE CRAB

While living on Seahorse Key for a week this summer, I tried to walk the flats every evening. We were out there during the "Super Moon" event, which meant that the extreme low spring tides of any full moon were "Super Sized".

 

The result was that the Gulf waters drained far and away from the shallow grassy flats on the outside of Seahorse Key exposing all kinds of awesome marine life and death drama.

Conchs, hermit crabs, whelks, tide pools with trapped fish wishing the tide back, wading birds, blue crabs, spider crabs, ... low tide life in abundance!

 

At one point during, what was for me, near total Intertidal Nerdvana, I happened to notice tiny trails in the muddy zone between the sandy beach and the beginning of the vast seagrass prairie.

 

Everyone knows that when you find a fascinating trail you should follow it ... and I did.

 

What I found at trail's end was a tiny bump in the sand.

 

An index finger "excavator" brought up the tiny horseshoe crab you see below.

 

 

 

You see a lot of horseshoe crabs around our Big Bend coast, and plenty of those in the summer will be juveniles, but this guy ... Wow!

So tiny.
So perfect ... no need to evolve much since the Paleozoic Era.
So damn cute.

Normally, I find it odd to use the word "cute" and horseshoe crab in the same sentence, but here, ladies and gentlemen, ... here is the exception.

While adult horseshoe crabs look like a creature that at any moment could suck on to your face and implant it's parasitic alien young inside you ... as infants, they have a definite, "Awwwww" factor.

What was REALLY AWWWWESOME was that a closer look at the mud flat revealed thousands of these tiny trails with a pea-sized horseshoe crab at the working end of each trail.

That's good news for the horseshoe crab population, good news for the fish, birds, and other marine life that will feed on this bounty, and good news for you humans whose medicines are checked for purity using an extract from horseshoe crabs.

When his photo shoot was over, I tucked this little horseshoe crab back into the comfortable embrace of the mud flat and wished him luck.