The End of a Dream Vacation!!

Looking through the palm trees at the sunset!

Seems only fitting to end this vacation with pictures of the sun setting over the Gulf of Mexico. Gail, Bill, John and Anne joined us for two evenings of watching the sun go down. It has been really quite warm even at sunset.

This is the Costa Rican devil plant which is growing in the yard here at the Edgewater Inn!! Sylvia (the owner) grew hers from seeds and she gave me ones so I could have an annual next summer!!

This is a very noisy royal tern seen on my morning walk.

Isn't this a gorgeous osprey. He was down at the Point and I was looking down on him instead of looking up as I usually do!

This is our almost daily visitor -- the yellow crowned night heron trying to get breakfast. You have seen him before!!

This is a double crested cormorant. For the life of me, even close up, I see no signs of any crests, so I have no idea where the name came from. I believe this is a young one. I actually am only a foot or so away from these very tame cormorants who I see each morning on my beach walk.

Again, a double crested cormorant but his dark coloring shows that he is an adult.

This crazy great white egret allowed me to get right up next to it when it was hunting for skinks, the little lizards that are everywhere down here. He got one seconds later.

This is our ever-present morning greeter - the great blue heron posing for his picture like he does each morning!

This last four weeks has seemed much too short. This is our last day in paradise down here in Ft. Myers Beach (boo hoo). The weather has been exceptional, the birding and shelling excellent and the company we have been keeping even better!! We have gotten to know my sister and her husband Bill much better and it has been really fun and I look forward to doing it again next year!!

The beaches are crowded now so my early morning walks aren't nearly as much fun. I don't even think they were this crowded last Christmas week and it took my sister an hour to get across the causeway yesterday when they came down for a beach visit. She spotted another Magnificent Frigatebird (remember I had seen four of them a couple of weeks ago during the storm we had). They certainly have an unmistakeable shape (see her posting for today to see a picture she took -- I didn't have my camera with me AGAIN). I had never seen one before this year but our landlords tell me they are a very common sight in the summertime around here.