Haven’t posted in a while as I’ve been crazy busy.  When we got home from Florida in mid-March we went as usual to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament where we got to judge again.  Very fun. Then it was time to get down to work.  I was hoping to get a large enough body of…

We finally made our way to Ed and Pam’s house in Englewood.  We had left the skeeters behind and in fact weren’t bothered again once we got to Corkscrew.  Ed has a boat and we were going to go out the next day on it but it was really windy so we went to a…

We went a lot of places on our way home and Denny took a ton of pictures so in order to not have too long of a blog I’m dividing it into two parts. We spent two nights in Collier Seminole SP, home of a multitude of mosquitos.  I believe the description of the mosquito…

Two days before we picked up Sam we did a little birding. We started off at a place reported to have a Buff-bellied Hummingbird, a Rufous Hummingbird and a Ruby-throated Hummingbird. We went there and found all three! We met a couple of people there, one who told us where to find a bunch of…

While we were waiting for the maintenance guys to prepare the walls to paint we had a few days to play.  We checked the So. Florida rare bird alert and saw there was a Western Spindalis at a park in Key Biscayne so we headed up to see if we could find it.  We got…

We’ve been here a week and we thought we’d fill you in on where we are and what we’re doing. Our first few days here we were getting organized and got our camper set up with our screen tent acting as our kitchen area. Our little 2 burner stove attaches to the outside of the…

We left Greenfield on January 21st heading for Florida. As we don’t like to drive for long stints every day we took the opportunity to stop along the way and visit friends and family. Our first stop was outside of Philadelphia, in Bryn Mawr, to see friends we’ve had since we lived in Buffalo 43 years…

If you can forget the politics it was a great year with lots of travel to Arizona, Cape May, Maine with Tessa and Leila, and South Africa.  We finished it up with six days in NYC with our 16 year old granddaughter Tessa.  Since she lives in Olympia, WA she hadn’t had a chance to…

We were up before sunrise to get to the Karoo for sunrise and our last full day of birding.  Karoo is low desert scrub. Aardvark hole We were looking mostly for LBJs and endemics.  We found 10 new species in the 1st 3 hours.  Pao describes these birds as “special, not beautiful”.  He only likes…

We left the Whale View this morning and our first stop was Table Bay Nature Reserve.  There were lots of White Pelicans, Greater Flamingos, waders and ducks.  We saw our 1st African Marsh Harrier.  We are in what is called Fynbos environment which supports tough, flexible plants and many beautiful flowers including over 60 varieties…