Sea Glass Christmas
December 23, 2023 20 Comments
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season from Florida!
Nature Photography by Pam & Richard
December 23, 2023 20 Comments
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season from Florida!
April 15, 2023 7 Comments
Spring nesting season is in full swing here in Florida. The great egret feather displays are exquisitely beautiful! In perfect timing, our Egret / Fringed Star Orchid (Epidendrum ciliare) is blooming now too! This lovely orchid is very fragrant at night.
January 1, 2023 10 Comments
Best wishes for the New Year – hope it brings magical moments in time! Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
“Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, and drink the wild air!”
Get out and enjoy nature – it’s good for your health!
December 23, 2022 15 Comments
Warm wishes to you for the holidays from our Florida “Snowman”!
December 11, 2022 14 Comments
The weather lately is perfect and we’re enjoying our home on the central east coast of Florida. Lots of flowers are blooming, rainbows and rocket launches are a treat, and it’s a lovely time for a walk at the beach!
February 26, 2022 8 Comments
In late November we rescued this Tersa sphinx moth caterpillar from the top of our trash can. How it got there I’ll never know. We placed it in a safe big aquarium with lots of leaves and sticks. It turned into a pupa shortly thereafter and emerged last week. We released it into the garden and it flew away at dusk. This moth (Xylophanes tersa) is a kind of hawk or hummingbird moth that drinks nectar at night. What a beauty!
January 30, 2022 5 Comments
Here is a look around our Florida Yard in January. The sandhill cranes are getting ready for nesting season. Mama raccoon always stops by for snacks leftover for the birds. Our orchids are blooming – they never stop year round. And the new koi pond on our back porch is a joy – so much fun!
October 30, 2021 12 Comments
Here in Florida the beach looks different every day. My favorite of all is when the water turns this stunning aqua blue. Makes for a great beach walk on our Space Coast!
September 15, 2021 6 Comments
What a spectacular launch tonight! SpaceX launched their first all-civilian crew into space at 8:02 pm Eastern Daylight Time this evening. The Inspiration4 mission is part of a fundraising effort to raise over $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (they provide care to children at no cost to families). Everything about this mission is great. If that wasn’t enough – it was a perfect evening here in Florida and the view was AMAZING!!!
August 28, 2021 2 Comments
Sebastian Inlet State Park, Florida, is a favorite of ours year round. In summer we especially enjoy walking out on the pier. It’s a great way to see the wildlife and enjoy the breeze. Great birds we’ve seen include royal terns, osprey carrying a black sea bass, and a rare black tern.
June 6, 2021 6 Comments
We’ve had a great year for purple martins! Nesting season is now coming to an end, with only a couple of nests remaining with babies. Here in Florida the season starts in January and ends in June. The total colony count this year was 176 birds including 28 nests (56 adults) containing 120 babies. Very soon the flock will leave, gather with others into roosts, and then migrate back to South America for the rest of the year.
Purple martins are so nice and cheery to have around. We miss them when they are gone!
This 4 1/2 minute video includes camera footage taken from inside one of the nesting gourds. We had never realized that purple martins collect green pepper tree leaves for the nest to act as a natural insect repellent. I have no idea how such tiny babies eat such big dragonflies!
April 23, 2021 8 Comments
SpaceX launched four astronauts of the Crew-2 mission into space at 5:49 am this morning (April 23, 2021). It was a spectacular sight here on the Space Coast of Florida – a magical moment of wonder! As I watched the rocket arc into the sky, I could hear the predawn birds calling and an alligator bellowing. A short time later the roar of the engines reached me at our backyard in Palm Bay. The crew will dock at the International Space Station on early Saturday morning for a six month stay. Learn more at: https://www.spacex.com/launches/
April 19, 2021 8 Comments
Goodwin Marsh near our home in Palm Bay, Florida, is a wonderful place to see birds in spring. So much beauty to see!
March 2, 2021 9 Comments
One of the joys in Florida is having sandhill cranes living in your neighborhood. We were thrilled this week when “our” sandhill crane pair brought their new fuzzy baby chick to our yard for a visit. So cute!
February 14, 2021 4 Comments
Warm wishes for a Happy Valentine’s Day from Florida!
February 13, 2021 12 Comments
For Christmas Richard got me a BLINK automatic outdoor security camera. Instead of using it for security, we use it to take wireless videos of the birds that visit our feeder. We also put one inside our purple martin nesting gourd. I extracted screenshots from the videos to post here. Love the variety and color of birds right outside our door here in Florida!
February 6, 2021 6 Comments
Malabar Scrub Sanctuary is a protected rare scrub habitat in Brevard County, Florida. It is part of the Space Coast’s Environmentally Endangered Lands program. Visitors come to see rare plants and animals in a beautiful setting. It’s a great place to hike!
January 31, 2021 Leave a comment
We like to grow BIG plants at our home here in Florida. Eight years ago this Pachypodium was only 6 inches tall when we planted it. Now it towers above me! Our agave recently shot up a HUGE flower spike that is over 16 feet tall! Bees love the flowers. Our rare orchid (Laelia moyobambae) has grown a flower spike for over 5 months now, which has peaked at 6 feet tall! It is tied to a frame for stability and raised a bit off the ground for root aeration. The flower head at the top has individual flowers a pretty bronze and purple color. Not much is known about this variety of orchid other than it comes from Peru (http://tropicalplantbook.com/garden_plants/orchids/Laelia/laelia_moyobambae.htm). WOW – we love plants!
January 17, 2021 9 Comments
We especially enjoyed the LEGO art on display at McKee Gardens over the holidays. It was great to see such creative sculptures by talented artist Sean Kenney in “Nature Connects: Art with LEGO Bricks”.
Click on any of the pictures to enlarge and see details about how many LEGO bricks are in the sculpture and how many hours it took to create it. For example, the Polar Bear with Cubs sculpture is the most complex – it is composed of 133,263 LEGO bricks and took 1,048.5 hours to build.
See Sean Kenney’s tour schedule by Imagine Exhibitions at: https://www.seankenney.com/portfolio/nature_connects/ See more of his work at: https://www.seankenney.com/exhibits/
January 12, 2021 5 Comments
We visited Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida, in December 2020. Lucky for us it is only a day trip from home and it was easy to walk around in isolation. It felt oh-so-good to visit such a beautiful place during the Christmas holidays. https://boktowergardens.org/
November 15, 2020 5 Comments
A full SpaceX crew launched tonight at 7:27 pm EDT here in Florida. Four astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station! WOW – what a spectacular view and achievement!!! Such a beautiful warm evening – the rocket lit up the whole sky. This was the view from our backyard pond in Palm Bay, Florida. Watch full coverage of the Crew-1 mission on NASA TV at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg&feature=emb_logo OR on SpaceX at https://www.spacex.com/
November 1, 2020 4 Comments
Rain showers made our yard lush and green and the flowers happy. Here is a little tour of what we see every day.
June 14, 2020 18 Comments
On Saturday morning in the predawn hour of 5:21 am SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here on Florida’s east coast. The sight was spectacular – WOW!!! The rocket trail was illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon. The glow in the bottom picture is from the booster return landing on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” offshore, which at that point was 350 miles away! Fifty-eight Starlink satellites and 3 Planet SkySats were sent into orbit. Read about it at: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-8-planet-satellite-launch-rocket-landing-success.html and https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-8-launch-amazing-twitter-photos.html
June 6, 2020 4 Comments
It’s that time of year here in Florida – our Queen-of-the-Night cactus is blooming every evening! This unassuming snake vine cactus (Selenicereus pteranthus), which is unremarkable for most of the year, steals the show in early summer. It is easily propagated because there are rootlets all along the plant. Each bloom opens and lasts only one night. The flowers are the size of dinner plates – wow!
May 25, 2020 Leave a comment
We are so excited to have a pair of great crested flycatchers nesting in our yard! For identification, look for the bird’s pretty lemon-yellow belly. The picture inside the nest box was taken with our tiny Insta360 ONE camera. We could see 3 babies in the nest at the bottom (middle). Surrounding the babies are the flycatcher’s unique nesting materials – lots of feathers and even a bit of black and white fur (upper right). Flycatchers are well known for weaving snakeskins into their nest, and this one has one too – how exciting! The nest also has two round white empty mud dauber pots (top). I wish we had gotten a picture of the eggs – they are creamy brown with purple squiggles on them. Maybe next year! A previous post about flycatchers is at: https://naturetime.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/great-crested-flycatchers-are-nesting/
May 11, 2020 16 Comments
Paired with my other post about Florida’s egrets and other white birds in spring, this post is about herons and dark feathered birds during nesting season. These colorful birds and their babies make me smile!
May 2, 2020 21 Comments
We love our Florida birds, especially in spring. This post shows egrets and other white birds during nesting season, when feathers are plumed and colors are bright. If you are lucky, you will see great egrets, snowy egrets, and cattle egrets together in one big breeding colony – it is quite a sight! Sometimes wood storks and white ibis nest there too!
April 28, 2020 8 Comments
We have so many purple martin babies! Did a backyard count here in Florida and the grand total for our nesting colony is 201 purple martins (107 babies, 22 eggs, and 72 adults). Ages range from eggs to newborn pinkies to older babies with pinfeathers. Love this time of year! Learn more from the Purple Martin Conservation Association at: https://www.purplemartin.org/
UPDATE May 16, 2020: Lots of babies fledging this week! Constant activity at the nesting gourds – great time of year!
April 6, 2020 18 Comments
We love the variety of wildlife in our backyard here in Florida. So much fun!
February 16, 2020 7 Comments
Did you know that vanilla flavor comes from an orchid? Each bean pod of Vanilla planifolia contains thousands of tiny black seeds – these are the black specs in vanilla bean ice cream! Pure vanilla extract in your spice cabinet comes from vanilla beans mixed with water and alcohol. In nature, Vanilla planifolia flowers can only be pollinated by hummingbirds and special bees. For commercial production, the orchids must be pollinated by hand. Orchids get more interesting all the time! Now who is hungry? Read more at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vanilla-comes-from_n_5021060