Myakka River Park/Venice Beach

  Back as promised with a few more photos from my mini trip this week. Friday I went to Sarasota's Myakka River Park. It is a huge park and is quite nice but I was disappointed in the lack of wildlife I encountered. Still I was able get at least capture a few nice landscape shots from the parks 'bird walk' which featured very few birds when I was there :( I dont get the chance to take these kinds of shots too often and the sky was beautiful so I am really happy with these!

  Beautiful isn't it?

  Now the above photo is not beautiful, nor is it of the best quality but it is interesting and bizarre. I saw this bird up in a tree eating something. I was kind of afraid to see what it might be when I zoomed in on it-expecting a bloody mouse-instead I saw that he had a fish head! Don't think he got much to eat off of that!

  The only other animals I was able to get close to were some buzzards hanging out on the side of the road. They sure are ugly! At this point I decided to drive to the nearby town of Venice, Florida. The main street there features a nice array of shops and restaurants and right down the road is Florida's version of Venice Beach-check out the view:

  Felt pretty nice to be standing here on an 80 degree day when it is 12 degrees up north :)  Fortunately there were some cute and funny birds hanging out here.

  These guys seem to do this looking down thing a lot. I like them they are cute.

  He looks a lot happier here!

Big mouth small tongue lol!

  Finally we have this little guy. I had never seen birds like this before moving here. At first I had to hunt for where their eyes were! They are called Black Skimmers-I was hoping they would have a more interesting name than that they remind me of clowns.  This is the only photo I could get of one by itself as they were tightly grouped together. They are more shy than the the other birds who didn't seem to mind me getting too close.  I tried and failed to get the kind of quality photo I want of a sandpiper-those little dudes really can run! They must sleep very well at night :)