Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge — 2016

Continuing on from yesterday’s post about the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge….

A plant community that becomes more evident the further south we drove is epiphytes with the Spanish moss being some of the most noticeable. But I took pictures of smaller ones as we walked around the boardwalk of the visitor center.

Flowers are always attention getters too.

Insects are even a bigger draw. Different kinds of bees were competing for flowers. The bumblebees are so big they usually drive the others away!

A long tailed skipper stayed put long enough for me to take a picture too.

The dragonflies looked similar to the dragonflies of Maryland.

We found a dead Polyphemus moth on the ground before we even walked into the visitor center. We perched it on a bush to photograph. It’s a male (large antennae to detect pheromone emitted by the females).

The seed pods on the button bushes in Florida look the same as the ones in Maryland.

And then there was a small tree in the pollinator with seedpods at various stages of maturity…and flowers too – obviously a legume.

When we got to the beach (the wildlife refuge abuts the Canaveral National Seashore), I noticed the sea grapes had color variation in their leaves and also had clusters of fruit.

These plants are planted on the dunes along the shore for stabilization.

There were a few gulls about but they were not as interesting as

The juvenile sanderling that seemed very interested in every piece of seaweed tossed up by the surf.

While we were in Florida earlier this month for the OSIRIS-REx launch, we spent a little time at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge although it was too hot to spend as long as we did before and after the Maven launch back in 2013 (posts from November 2013: Roseate Spoonbills, Brown Pelicans, Alligators, Bald Eagles, Osprey, beach). The Black Point Wildlife Drive was not open until mid-September so we 1) stopped at the visitor center, 2) checked the Manatee Observation Deck and the Bairs Cove boat ramp and 3)drove down the Bio Lab Road….and saw quite a lot in a couple of morning hours. I had a hard time narrowing down the pictures I want to share so am doing it in two posts instead of one!

I didn’t see any alligators (it was warm enough that they were not basking on the sides of waterways…they are harder to spot when only their eyes are out of the water) but we did see some reptiles near the visitor center: cooter turtles

And a lizard (that posed on a sign!).

My attention was drawn to leaves. There are so many plants in Florida that don’t grow in Maryland.

And then there were the birds. The osprey seemed to be everywhere. Many times the white head fooled me into thinking the bird was a bald eagle until I took a closer look. One was precarious perched on a pine branch over water near the bridge over the haul over canal between Bairs Cove and the Manatee Observation Deck.

We saw another along the Bio Lab Road…with feathers ruffled from the wind.

The wildlife refuge is right next to Cape Canaveral…can you spot the heron is this picture with the Vehicle Assembly Building in the background? It’s just below and to the left of the building images…stating on a small island of vegetation.

Here its after I zoomed in as much as I could. It’s probably a Great Blue Heron.

There were tri-color herons as well.

Ibis were feeding in the distance.

But the American White Pelicans were by far the most numerous birds that we saw. They winter here and must have just arrived recently. There was a film crew on the Bio Lab Road that was filming the birds as a helicopter swept overhead and caused them to fly up several times. I got a reasonable picture of them in flight as well.

A little further along the road were some black vultures. We saw them soaring every day we were in Florida and, a few times, they were cheekily grouped on the ground. We stopped for them…let them go at their own pace.