Breakfast with ibises

After twelve hours on the road, we arrived at a rented condo on Cedar Key in the Gulf Coast of Florida and saw very little. At twilight under a gray sky, we could see the Gulf of Mexico just beyond our balcony, a fishing pier just off to the left, and an expanse of island fading into the gloom. We took a walk out on the pier, and by the time we'd turned back around, the whole area was socked in with thick fog. But at one point we looked up and saw, gliding across the gray sky, a flock of ibises. That's when I knew we weren't in Kansas anymore, or Ohio either. Where a whole flock of ibises can fly overhead, anything is possible.

This morning's sun revealed more wonders. At high tide the water laps on rocks just a few yards from our balcony, but this morning's low tide revealed a broad stretch of mud flats, which attracted birds that dabbled in the mud for breakfast. Just a few feet away a pair of white ibises fought over a morsel of something dug up from the mud, while nearby a host of other birds searched for sustenance--great egrets and little egrets, a tricolored heron and a little blue heron, cormorants and gulls and terns and pelicans, so many pelicans swooping just inches above the still water and then diving for a tasty treat.

We've spent a lot of time today sitting on the balcony looking at the water, or, alternately, sitting on the beach looking at the water, much more relaxing than the interstate traffic we spent so much time looking at yesterday. This morning we hiked through Florida scrubland looking for missing trail markers but finally found our way back, and this evening we'll walk a few blocks to a restaurant in search of local clams--and we won't even have to dabble in the mud to find them.

On our short drive to the scrubland hike, we passed a spot where roseate spoonbills were dabbling in the water alongside the road, but there was no good place to pull off and watch them. But I've researched places where roseate spoonbills gather and I'm determined to see some up close in the next couple of days. If weather permits, we'll rent a kayak and paddle out to Atsena Otie Island, where wildlife abounds in the midst of the ruins of a ghost town and pencil factory. (Cedar Key was named for the cedars that grew here abundantly before they were transformed into pencils.)

At some point I'll be able to edit the many photos I've been taking with my cranky camera, but meanwhile I'll include just a few views from our balcony before the fog rolls in again to draw a curtain over the beauties of Cedar Key.

The view from our balcony at low tide.