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Tag Archive | Stewardship

Creature From Down Under

By Gary May 12, 2017 1 Comment

During a recent walk near Lake Tsala Apoka, Anne spots a strange creäture clinging to the edge of the sidewalk. I look down to see an insect with large eyes and claw-like legs. This weird-looking bug is a cicada nymph that just crawled out of the ground. Cicadas are those insects you hear buzzing from […]

No Stone Left Unturned

By Gary June 5, 2016 Leave a comment

Walking along the shore of Cocoa Beach, I see a bird foraging in the wake of the waves washing up on the sandy beach. It is the beautiful ruddy turnstone. In the shallow wake water it flips shells, small pebbles and natural debris to find mollusks, worms and other invertebrates. Although you can find this […]

Barred Owl

By Gary April 12, 2016 Leave a comment

This evening a barred owl flies out of one tree into another. Since it was dusk, I pushed the ISO to 3200 on my camera to adjust for the dim lighting. The owl was hunting mice, rabbits and squirrels that were eating their last morsels of food before darkness set in. And I was hunting […]

Lichens – Litmus for Air Quality

By Gary February 5, 2016 Leave a comment

Each spring, the parula warbler constructs nests made of bearded lichen in the mature forests of northern U.S. and southern Canada. This lichen is so important to the nesting success of this bird that when the lichen disappeared because of air pollution in the mid 1900’s, it stressed the populations of this tree top warbler. […]

The Regal Florida Panther

By Gary March 6, 2015 Leave a comment

Hunted to near extinction by the mid-1950’s, the Florida panther was listed as endangered by the U.S. Department of Interior in 1967. The population decreased to approximately 20 Florida Panthers in the wild. The Florida panther is actually a subspecies of the American mountain lion. It lives in hardwood hammocks, cypress swamps and pinelands in […]