Nurtured by Nature--Last Day!

The dance of the palm trees, the oceans calling, the first rays of sun and heaven is here. ~Mike Dolan

I got too busy packing up and finishing up at our place in Ft. Myers to post last night, so I thought I would do it tonight....from South Carolina! :(  It seems that our time in paradise goes much too quickly, especially this one since we had so much to do. I wouldn't trade it for the world though.  Our last trip to the beach was early yesterday(Friday) morning. The low tide was before sunrise, but we got there right at sunrise and were amazed by the amount of bling on the beach....we immediately started picking up juvenile fighting conchs, and I ran into a string of murex, both lace and apple.....as quickly as I could pick them up.

Don't you just love sunrises (or sunsets) over the water??

There was also lots of sea life scattered in among all the bling it was like a science field trip... like this little guy! He was very small and moved very slowly....I didn't have a chance to look up what kind he was...

I think this guy is called a batfish, very freaky looking!

This is a tulip shell egg case, you can see the little guys still in each 'petal'.  I sent it back into the gulf after this photo op.

If you click on the picture, it will get larger and you can see the individual baby shells.

With all of this, pretty quickly the tide came in and made it very difficult to see so shelling wasn't great, but it was certainly an interesting adventure.  I managed to find more for my project, including this millipede sea star, which had been out in the sun too long.

When we got back to the car, we saw this pileated woodpecker in a tree....that is awesome because I believe they are no longer found in our area, or have become very rare.

He was very interested in getting to whatever was in that tree so he didn't mind me getting closer for a video.

I hope you have enjoyed this trip with us, will post later with some of the updates we made at the house in Ft. Myers, and hopefully with a new project.

Thanks for tagging along!

::Hugs::

Cheri