I am continuing with my daily record of five things and decided to share today’s effort on WordPress. (For more about this prompt, read Summer’s description of the Five Things Essay here: The Five Things Essay.) For this post, the five things are about one place: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge (aka the refuge). The refuge is located about 30 miles south of Tallahassee near the coast. It’s our favorite place to ride our bicycles (which, by the way, are getting long in years just like us). Here are five things about the refuge that we enjoyed when we went there for Thanksgiving.

Wildlife

There is wildlife in this photo, a young deer grazing. It’s almost smack dab in the middle of the scene. While I was disappointed that I didn’t get a better photo, it was exciting to have a deer nonchalantly grazing among the grasses, curious about me but not fearful. There’s no hunting allowed in the refuge although there is in the wildlife management area that borders it. We wear bright colors during hunting season since bullets don’t respect borders.

The Bayou Stony Trail

This is really my favorite part of the loop that we ride. The photo on the top shows the view as we approach the stony trail, and the next photo shows the (very much) stony trail (plus part of the front wheel of my husband’s bike). Both of these were shot with a wide-angle lens, skewing the clouds a bit. And, yes, that big bright spot in the bottom photo is the sun. The roughness of this part of the loop makes for a bumpy ride, but on this trip, we had the added disadvantage of riding into clouds of (possibly) midges (very tiny insects). Yuck. I never pedaled so hard and so relentlessly on this stretch as I did on Thanksgiving. I kept my mouth close but I was also afraid of the midges flying up my nose. Yuck again.

Ring Dike

We survived the midge swarms and made it safely to a favorite rest stop: Ring Dike. An overgrown semicircular trail takes you from the main trail to a spot with two sturdy benches by the bayou. The first photo is the view from where I was sitting. The second photo is a panaromic. You can see how lovely the day was. Interesting clouds but mostly blue sky. At Ring Dike, we always drink hot tea and munch on homemade banana bread, nuts and raisins, and Lindt dark chocolate truffles.

Buzzards

We always see a buzzard or two on our trips, but this time we saw a “wake” of buzzards. (Seriously, why the word “wake”? See Collective Nouns for Birds. Of course, there is something a bit ominous about seeing several buzzards at once). They flew in and roosted on a bare-branched tree. I thought about getting off my bike to take some pictures, but I didn’t want to spook them into flying off. Of course, riding by the tree was enough to spook them anyway, so I stopped and got a few so-so photos. Below is the best one.

 

Alligators

A trip to the refuge isn’t complete if we don’t see at least one alligator. Given that temperatures were on the chilly side, most alligators we saw were in the water. Riding along, I saw an ahinga (also known as a snake-bird or water turkey) drying its wings on a log. It seemed like a good photo opportunity. Then I saw the alligator off to the right.

 

This is perhaps the largest living alligator I have ever seen, at least in recent memory. Greg estimates it was about eight feet long. EIGHT FEET LONG! Fortunately, there was a body of water between us and it so I didn’t have to be shy about taking photos. Still, the one photo I didn’t get was when the gator decided to turn around and I saw all its teeth. I was standing yards away but I saw ALL ITS TEETH. Then it slipped into the water, leaving a few inches of its tail exposed on the land. Kind of like when our cat Wendy wraps herself up in her fleecy blanket but leaves her feet sticking out. Kind of … but not quite.

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So, now I can say I completed my five things prompt (or essay or draft or whatever you want to call it). I hope you enjoyed the photos. We’re planning another bike trip this week, and it will be colder than last week. I’ll be looking for alligators, but unless there’s a sunny spot on land (preferably not on the trail), they’ll likely be in the water. Stay tuned, and thank you for reading.