Rookery Bay

Every Friday night there is a sunset  cruise of Rookery Bay organized by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. Rookery Bay is south of Naples just west of the road to Marco Island.  The bay and its islands form part of the Ten Thousand Islands region.

The Good Fortune II

The pontoon boat, Good Fortune II (it does make you wonder if her predecessor had some bad fortune?), holds about thirty people plus a captain and two naturalists. We set sail a little early, about 4:30 p.m., from the dock on Shell Island Road because the tide was scheduled to be especially low this evening.  The captain did not want to get stranded on return.

After the standard safety briefing we pulled out into Hall Bay and began immediately spotting things.  First was a dolphin who surfaced and dived about 200 yards from our boat.  He was near shore, alone, and obviously hunting for dinner in the shallow waters as the tide was running.

Soon we came upon a spot where some bald eagles had set up a nest and raised their brood.  The young eagle have grown a lot and gotten bigger.  A little like teenagers, they got angry when their parents did not bring home as much food as the young ones thought was proper.  And, again like teenagers, they tore up the eagle nest where they were raised.  So now, everyone is simply sitting in trees.  This is of course also the way the adult eagles teach the young eagles to hunt for their own dinner.  But it makes a nice story for the tourists.

Bald Eagle on Slash Pine

We hung about for a while to see what might transpire, but the eagles simply sat in the trees and watched the tourists. I began to realize that either because of the depths (shallow) or concern for the wildlife (it is the Conservancy, after all), the boat was not going to get very close to the trees or the birds.  The Conservancy naturalist told about DDT and how it nearly wiped out the bird population until it was banned in 1974 as a result of increased attention to the environment ("Silent Spring" and all that). The male adult bald eagle simply sat there, looking regal.  He did not move much.  Eventually, we simply moved along the bay to see what else might appear.

Tricolored Heron

We did have a pretty good luck spotting the tricolored heron which sports a distinctive white breast and blue-grey feathers on his back.  We saw several of them as we motored past the red mangroves that predominate here. When the bird is in breeding plumage, they have long blue filamentous plumes on the head and neck, and buff ones on the back. This is a pretty bird, walking in the shallow waters and hunting for fish who might mistake his shadow for a protecting tree.

The highlight of the trip might have been the osprey, simply because we were able to get

Mother osprey with fledgling

close to them and watch the mothers feeding the fledglings with fresh fish that the fathers had caught and brought in.  The parents will tear the fish apart, and for the very young, they eat the fish and regurgitate it into the mouths of the chicks.  As the chicks mature, they don't need the pre-eating service anymore, but they still wait hungrily for the parents to deliver dinner.  And they are pretty vocal about their hunger pangs.

This mother sat vigilantly up on the next, tearing a fish apart and feeding the pieces to her chick beside her.  They both kept a close eye on our boat as we hovered nearby, but clearly they also felt they had little to fear from tourist snowbirds.  A little bit further along, we saw a male osprey

come swooping in with a very large fish in his talons.  It must have weighed nearly as much as he did, and he found it necessary to set the fish down on a tree and recover his breath from the battle. Indeed, we wondered if he would have difficulty flying off the tree branch with the fish in his claws.

The Good Fortune II circled around for a while, but the osprey family kept watching us and not making a move to shift the fish over to the nest.  We suspected that our presence made them cautious.  So, we motored on.

Brown Pelican

On our left side was Keewaydin Island, one of the barrier islands that protect the Everglades from hurricanes and storms.  People do own property on the island, but today they are restricted from selling it to anyone but relatives.  There is no power, water or sanitary facilities on the island, so it is a pretty rustic lifestyle.  The sand is shallow and sits on a bed of shells. This is a favored breeding ground for the loggerhead turtle, but we did not see one.  We did pass a trio of young brown pelicans who seemed to be waiting for better fishing conditions. 

At last the Good Fortune II turned into Rookery Bay itself.  We could see large numbers of birds resting on the islands in the bay, but our captain seemed not to want to get too close.  The naturalist told us that the guano smell can be pretty fierce if you're downwind because the birds really do pack themselves into the trees on these islands. We motored by at a considerable distance. Oh well.

Pretty soon we were returning to the dock at Shell Island Road.  We met a Wyndemere couple with similar travel interests to ours, so we agreed to go out to dinner together.  We drove a little further south on highway 951 to the Isle of Capri Road and stopped at the Capri Fish House.  It's a little restaurant in a building on the beach with a tent for overflow seating, and one very small but busy kitchen.  The food was great, my seafood platter being both enormous and fresh -- I could not finish the frog's legs -- but the service a little more than disorganized.  I thought Diego would never get us any bread or wine, but he eventually came through in most important respects. It was a good meal to finish off a pleasant evening.