Where have all the pretty birds gone?

                                                    ©2016 Lydia Hinshaw

Turkey vulture on turkey day at Lake Woodruff

 DE LEON SRINGS, FL -- Prior to our traditional Thanksgiving feed at the eat-too-much buffet at Brian's Barbecue in DeLand, we spent an hour or so tramping around the nearby Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge.

 Several years ago, Lake Woodruff was the land of opportunity for wildlife photographers, particularly for Prince Charming and myself, since it's only about 25 miles from home.

 I've had an otter flop right out into the trail in front of me and pose for a memory-card full of frames.

 I've seen hawks and herons and sandhill cranes with chicks.  I've even seen a bald eagle a couple of times.  And plenty of alligators, not that I'm a particular fan.

 I'm not sure what happened, but five or six years ago, we went to Lake Woodruff after a summer away and didn't see anything but vultures.  Black vultures, turkey vultures, hundreds of them, hopping around like chickens in front of us wherever we walked.  Staring at us from perches in trees and on the observation deck.

 Vultures are carrion eaters.  They are enamored of dead things.  We didn't like the implications of their interest in us.  And although Mother Nature has created many beautiful things, vultures are not one of her more photogenic models.

 So we lost interest in Lake Woodruff for a while, hadn't been there in a couple of years.  Curiously, the two National Wildlife Refuges we frequent, this one and Merritt Island, have seemed to have fewer and fewer birds each winter.  We find it more interesting to visit a couple of semi-artificial wetlands created by municipal water departments, one in Christmas and another in Viera, or the rookery at the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, a commercial tourist attraction..

 Since we were going to be in the neighborhood, it was a good time to see if anything had changed at Lake Woodruff.  Well, the vultures numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds, but they were still the dominant players in the scenery.

 We spotted a total of four sandhill cranes, a few herons, a couple of hawks and a turtle, none of them close enough to photograph.

 The vultures escorted us, hoping one of us would die, or perhaps that we would kill something else and provide them a meal.

 They were inevitably disappointed and we made it to Brian's in time to claim the pole positions in the buffet line.

 I'm not one to waste internal storage on turkey when unlimited ribs and pecan pie are available, so I had a non-traditional but fine Thanksgiving feast.  The Prince, whose appetite is still recovering after his year of medical adventures, tried small bites of a lot of things, and finished my pecan pie when it suddenly became so sweet I couldn't take another bite.

 We spent the afternoon in our camp chairs by the St. Johns River, where I finished the book I was reading and he settled in for a nap.
 Another Thanksgiving officially complete.