Other People's Blogs

There are some 10 million blogs. I only follow a few, but they are a very good few, and I wanted to share some of their recent postings with you. But first, we need a photo, and I'm lucky enough to have hundreds of great photos to chose from, thanks to Jim and Matt and friends. This beauty is one of Jim's - a Brown Pelican mother and baby. (As usual, click to enlarge.)

David McRee had a particularly interesting December 21st post on his Blog the Beach. He spent the day on a bird rescue trip to the Skyway Bridge State Park Fishing Pier with a volunteer from the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, documenting the problems that arise when fishermen and pelicans are after the same fish in the same space. We have our own dandy Florida Wildlife Hospital here in Melbourne, and we'll be devoting a post to their activities and an upcoming volunteer training session in January.

I was looking for Brown Pelican information, and one of the links was for a web site called South Dakota Birds and Birding! Since I was born and raised in western South Dakota and still remember those winters, I was a little sceptical, but this is a delightful site developed by a guy that loves birds. He has a FREE 2009 printable bird calendar - each month prints on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper, with half the page devoted to a bird photo and the other half to the calendar. I've printed out January - the bird is a Horned Lark in snow. Good stuff!

I found this next blog by serendipity. Pure Florida is mostly about the Nature Coast, a wonderful part of Florida's west coast that runs from Pasco County north through Wakulla County. The blogger (Florida Cracker, or FC for short) has a great spirit line - "If it ain't true Florida nature or Florida culture, it ain't here. At Pure Florida, we don't just admire nature ... we participate." He has a companion site, Pure Florida Food ,with recipes - it's worth a look just for the photo in the header!

I've mentioned Amanda's Veranda to you before, primarily because of her beautiful photos of the northeast U.S. and her fabulous music selection. If you want to see what the weather is like in Washington State, look at the closeups of frosted trees in her December 27th post entitled "Am I living in Antartica?" And don't miss her bird pix. Cactus Jack Splash gives us a horse's perspective on the weather there - if it's above 30 degrees, he does not have to wear his tarp!

There are others, but these are the nature/critter-related blogs I follow. I use Google Reader to list when these blogs are updated. It's a "cool tool" - let me know if you need directions (and thanks to David McRee for getting me started on it).