radiosky's Journal

It is still pandemic time, but with great care we had to make a short visit to the Tampa area of Florida, in mid May 2020. I haven't traveled much, but Florida is my favorite place for wildlife. Hawaii, where I spend most of my tropical days is a species desert compared to Florida. Yet Florida has some serious challenges precisely because it is so conducive to life. Whenever I put my dip net in a body of water in Florida, I am almost as likely to pull up an exotic as a native species. The stream bottoms are heavily scoured by South American catfishes, the trees dotted with parakeets. In a few hours of a few days I was overwhelmed by the variety of things I saw. I am left wishing fo see more but without the energy or skill to record even a small fraction of it all. I hope to be better prepared with a good camera for birds (so someone will believe that was seeing blue-crowned parakeets). and also a better system for photographing aquatic things.