Ok, this is my final entry for my visit to the rookery at St. Augustine Alligator Farm…last but not least, the tri-colored heron…and some odds and ends…
Ok, about those odds and ends...There were a few wood storks…they must've been exhausted, having to bring all those babies in, eh? Wink-wink.
One interesting pair of residents (?) were these white-cheeked pintail ducks…Da whaa? You may ask blank-faced…this duck belongs in the Caribbean, S. America, and the Galapagos Islands…it's a vagrant (just look at that devious leer) to Florida…apparently it's called the lesser Bahama pintail in Florida and the Caribbean (an alias to go with its vagrancy)…the ducks were on a tiny "pond" near the alligator pit and there was a name plate for them, but they weren't actually caged in…guess they really like the security system on hand…(did I mention that "the pit" holds 42 gators? A few of them were roughly the size of a cruise ship…)
…There also happened to be a pair of "normal" (Northern) pintails on hand, also with their own name plate and also free to leave...
…I sheepishly admit that in the past two years in Florida, I kinda knew, kinda ignored the fact that the boat-tailed grackles aren't the only grackles in the state…but in S. Florida, where we lived our first six months here, the boat-tails were all I saw…and heard…if I ever saw the common grackle before this visit to the rookery, then I didn't realize it so technically this is a lifer…the commons are 4 inches smaller than the boat-tails, and they come in "purple" and "bronze".
