Global Cooling at Lakes Park

Free time to experience SW Florida's wildlife has been extremely limited these past weeks.

The Great Egret with Snowy Egret above was photographed at Lakes Park in January 2010.

On the first occasion for observation and photography this year where there wasn't an overcast sky, the temperature was near freezing at dawn. For that reason I made the very easy decision to simply stay warm indoors.

Earlier this week, I had heard two reports that there were significant fish deaths in lakes and ponds across the state of Florida. One of the reports specifically mentioned Lakes Park which I was compelled to visit to see the bird activity the fish might have attracted.

The Snowy Egret above was photographed at Lakes Park in January 2010.

Although I was not able to arrive at Lakes Park until near sundown on Tuesday, I still brought the camera with hopes to document something interesting. The bird activity was more prevalent than in any of my handful of other visits to the park in the past couple of years.

It was my greatest hope to see the Scarlet Ibis which has been observed at the park on occasion. Images available of it can certainly never do it justice for its beauty.

The Snowy Egret with Tricolored Heron above was photographed at Lakes Park in January 2010.

Although I saw many hundreds of birds in very close proximity including ibis, heron, egret, stork, the Scarlet Ibis was again elusive.

The timing of my visit to Lakes Park was a mere day and a half after I had heard of the fish kill, but the evidence of the event was non existent as might be explained by the great abundance of birds at the park. The cleanup effort was complete.

The Wood Stork above was photographed at Lakes Park in January 2010.

I took photographs of the birds I did see, primarily attempting to capture them in flight, and unfortunately had little success as the lighting was quite poor and I was shooting at a relatively high ISO setting to keep the shutter speed up.

It was a tremendous amount of fun in the experience nonetheless.

Another report heard this past week was that the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico had reached the high of that in the Atlantic Ocean. Does that mean a disappearance of the Gulf Stream if not just temporarily?