Wednesday September 28

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Wednesday Sept 28:

While we pray for the people in Florida that are going to be hit today by Hurricane Ian, the weather here is also changeable.

We went to the Spanish Lagoon for birding again, around 8, and then came back for breakfast. Still no more humming birds.

Then we packed up to drive to the right side of Baby Beach to check out the turtles. This is where we took Tom and Amy, and we have to say – with embarrassment – that after years of maligning Baby Beach for snorkeling, it was very good, especially for the variety of soft corals. I counted 33 different species of fish, including 2 different eels. It’s just that all this is in the very center of the bay, and most people don’t go out more than 100’ from Big Mama’s, which is just sand. We were in the water when it started to sprinkle, and we sat in the semi-rain under the divi divi tree to eat the sandwiches we had brought. But then it really started to rain, and, in fact, the roads were incredibly flooded on our way back. Up to the wheel wells in places! That's the last picture I attached here.

Back here in the center of the island it obviously had not rained so much.

So part of our relaxing afternoon was spent on the matching lounge chairs: David with his big lens and me reading. And we got a NEW BIRD. Not all that interesting to look at, a Northern scrub-flycatcher! but takes us to a nice round 550 for our life list.

We returned to Spanish Lagoon around 5 pm to get another look at things: very glad to see all three of the burrowing owls. (I keep worrying that they will be drowned out.) No H.B. once again, but we DID find 2 orioles building their hanging nests and them coming back and forth. These are Yellow Orioles, which we saw last year here. Believe it or not, we’ve seen a total of 7 different types of Orioles on our lifelist. And we saw a juvenile yellow-crowned night heron – we’ve never seen one that stage.

So it has been a relatively quiet day. I insisted on hopping in the pool before we reheated our grouper curry I cooked last night. And yes we are getting THREE meals from that grouper, so not a bad price at all.

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