Sea-Beans, Sea-Turtles, and Sundays

Time flies when you're having fun, and moves pretty briskly when you're just messing around, too. We're only three months away from the sea-bean symposium; it's October 16-17 this year, so mark your calendar. David McRee found a sea coconut on his gulf coast beach and did a nice post about it and the symposium on his Blog the Beach (see Reference Links below). While David would not expect to find a sea coconut on his side of Florida, it is one of the most plentiful sea-beans on our Atlantic coast. Sea coconuts are about the size of a golf ball and covered with a brown, black, or grey husk. They grow in clusters of two or three on palm trees in the tropics and float up to our beaches via the Gulf Stream. (This sea coconut photo is one of Matt MacQueen's.)

A couple of weeks ago, I ventured up to Port Canaveral with friends Kirby and Bev Collins. You can read about it in my Space Coast Eco blog. Be sure to watch the slide show - there's some nice photos of the juvenile green sea turtles that call the Port home. With my slow old camera, I got a lot of photos of water where a turtle had just been, but Kirby took some great pictures and shared them. Kirby and Bev do an excellent tourist destination site called Places Around Florida (see Reference Links below) and live in Cape Canaveral, so they were the perfect guides. This is one of Kirby's photos - be sure to click to enlarge it.

All continues to go well with the nesting black skimmers and the space shuttle, so other than frequent severe weather bulletins, it's been a fine week!

Reference Links:
Blog the Beach (David McRee's blog - see the July 18th post about his sea-bean find)
Places Around Florida (Kirby and Bev's site)
Space Coast Eco (my field trip to Port Canaveral)