PICTURES FROM PARADISE




 

This is the view from my home office
window and from our patio

Special Note: 
The White Pelicans are not native to the Southwest Florida area.
Every year around the end of November to the beginning
of December, they migrate to our area from the
Pacific Northwest areas of the United States
and Canada. They usually stay here
until around April and then they
fly back to their home areas.

 

This is another group of our White Pelicans on the lake. On this day, there were at least a couple of hundred of these beautiful birds on our lake.	This is another of our migratory birds. This is a Wood Stork and they migrate here to Southwest Florida from somewhere in Africa.
This is "Charley", our resident Blue Heron and he is one of our permanent residents. Charley was injured in some kind of accident and he has a large scar on his side and he hangs out here at our lake feasting on small fish and frogs and he just loves the hand outs from the residents of our complex.	Charley is standing just outside my office window patiently waiting for me to come out and throw him a few sardines. Sometimes he will walk right up to the window when I have it open and he just stands there looking in until I tell him I'll be right out with your snack.
This is "Annie", another of our permanent residents. Anhingas swim like ducks and they dive under water to find small fish and frogs that they spear with their very sharp pointed beak.	After so many dives, their feathers become water logged and they have to stand in the sun to dry out before they can fly to another area.
This is "Giggles", another of our permanent residents, This strange bird is known as an American Morehen and when they call each other, they sound like somebody who has a case of the giggles. So we call them "Giggle Birds"	This is "Giggles" and his girl friend or "significant other". The only way we seem to be able to tell the difference between males and females is that the male has a bright red beak and a couple of white feathers on each side of the tail.
This is just one more of our permanent residents. This is a "Snowy Egret" and just like the rest of our wildlife crew around here, he is a real "moocher". Whenever we go out to feed the ducks and fill the bird feeder, he's right there to grab whatever he can steal from the other birds.	And this is the view from my very nice home office window. My office is set up in the third bedroom of our condo and sometimes it has to do double duty as a guest bedroom when we have family or friends visiting from up North.  Our guests  are always totally impressed with the view and with all of our "critters".

As you can see from these pictures, (don't pay any attention to the dates on theses pictures. I did not notice the date setting was wrong until after I took all of these pictures) we live in an absolutely beautiful condo complex. We have a large, horseshoe shaped ten acre lake in the middle of the complex with a paved walk all the way around the lake. It is exactly a half mile walk around the lake.

Whoever was responsible for laying out this complex was quite obviously environmentally conscious and was definitely concerned about the wildlife in the area. There are only eleven buildings down each side of the lake with only four condos in each building. There is quite a bit of open space between the buildings and it is quite obvious the developers did not opt to go for the "High Density Population" as a lot of the other complexes have done with all of the high rise buildings and cramming as many buildings as possible into a limited amount of space. At the opposite end of the lake from the clubhouse and pool complex, there is a large area that has been left as an open area for the wildlife and is landscaped very nice.

We are located just about three quarters of a mile from the Gulf of Mexico and just about five miles from Sanibel Island, the playground of the world's rich and famous. We are also a little less than three miles straight down San Carlos Blvd from another world famous playground, Ft. Myers Beach.