The lazy days of fishing, strolling by the Gulf, and eating continue. On Sunday we took Carolyn to the airport in Tallahassee, as she has to go back to her medical practice in Michigan (she’ll be moving down here next January). In the meantime, here’s the house where we’re staying. Carolyn and Doug have another house right across the street; this one appears to be used for guests:
Carolyn and Cap’n Doug on the front porch of the other house:
Two trees in our front yard: perhaps readers can recognize them, as I forgot the names. This one has bark that naturally peels off:
I believe this is a pine:
The trees and vegetation grow very quickly here because of the warm and humid climate. Here’s a tree that has absorbed the wire fence like an amoeba absorbs its prey:
Every day for breakfast we head to the Apalachicola Coffee & Chocolate Company for the ideal breakfast: coffee and pie. This is a fantastic chocolate and coconut pie with meringue:
On the way to Tallahassee, we took a route through a region that harbors the rare and endangered red-cockaded woodpecker (Leuconotopicus borealis). This woodpecker has hardly any red color; as the Cornell website notes, “Males have a tiny, nearly invisible red streak (“cockade”) at the upper border of the cheek. (Females are red-less.) Here’s a photo of a male from the Audubon site that shows the red streak pretty well.
The Cornell bird site notes the reason for the species’ rarity:
This endangered species is a habitat specialist that is strongly tied to old-growth pine forests that burn frequently, leaving the understory mostly clear of younger pines and hardwoods. They were once common in vast tracts of longleaf pine; now they also occur in loblolly, slash, and some other pine stands in the southeastern pine flatwoods
These old-growth forests are rare, and burning is now done by the Forest Service rather than by lightning strikes. We drove through one, and naturalists had marked with a white ring every tree that harbored a red-cockaded nest. There were quite a few white-ringed trees, but the area is small. Here’s one; can you spot the nest hole?
Note that the burn is clearly visible as the charring of the trunks, the absence of undergrowth, and the new, bright green fern fronds:
Here it is; and it looks as if it’s been lined with a piece of pipe or something. Maybe readers can explain.
We did see one red-cockaded woodpecker, but I couldn’t photograph it as it was simply a dark blob hopping on the side of a tree. Still, it’s on my life list, and I gather that few people who set out to see one of these birds actually succeed.
We then drove to the tiny town of Sumatra, Florida (population 148 in 2010), which has a restaurant well known for its fried grouper.
Like many towns in this area, Sumatra is religious. There are plenty of churches to be seen and plenty of evangelical signs. I’m not quite sure what this one means. I suppose you could construe it as meaning that we’re going to live again after death, but are now inhabiting a world that’s transitory and torturous.
The old post office in “town” (if you can call it that; it’s just a few buildings and houses). A very atmospheric old place—no doubt once the center of the town’s social life:
The Family Coastal Restaurant, an old-time restaurant with friendly local waitstaff:
There was a Sunday buffet, which I didn’t get but Doug and Carolyn did. John and I opted for the grouper dinner with fried green tomatoes and hush puppies, for grouper (not on the buffet) is the restaurant’s signature dish.
I changed the buffet sign’s dessert feature from “chocolate cake” to “chordate cake”. I’m a bad boy:
A grouper dinner, with delicious fried fillets of the fish, fried green tomatoes, and two crunchy hush puppies. It was great. I washed it down with sweet iced tea (“the table wine of the South”); John also had a bowl of oyster stew, which he couldn’t finish as it was the size of a huge soup tureen.
After lunch we combed the roadside to find the local carnivorous plants: pitcher plants and sundews. We found both, though we got wet. (These plants live in marshy, nutrient-poor soils, which is why they’ve evolved to catch insects.) I can’t remember the species of large pitcher plant, but perhaps a reader can oblige (to me it looks like the hooded pitcher plant, Sarracenia minor, which flowers in April and May; the purple flower is not the pitcher plant’s).
Photos of two flowering pitcher plants. Insects fall into the pitcher and are digested by enzymes in the pool of liquid in the pitcher’s bottom. To the right you can see a dead reddish-brown pitcher:
A very strange flower:
And a sundew. This species isn’t known to me but resembles the pink sundew, Drosera capillaris. The plants are very small—just two inches across. The leaves have sticky tentacles that entrap attracted insects, and then curl inward, dissolving the insect with enzymes and absorbing the digested goo into the plant.
Wakulla, Florida, a town that loves Jesus, but appears to have done so for only a decade:
In Wakulla, Doug made us stop at the local general store, 95% of which was devoted to fishing gear. I had to walk around for about an hour while these guys looked at fishing porn, as they’re doing in the photo below.
At the counter Doug had a chat with a guy buying a case of Dr. Pepper (a soft drink beloved in the South). They chatted briefly about the guy’s boat parked outside, which was a flat-fronted skiff different from Doug’s boat. Doug observed to Mr. Pepper that “you can never have enough boats.” The guy replied, “Yeah—the problem is convincing The Wife of that.”
A sign outside the store. For the life of me I can’t figure how they could spell one word right and the other word wrong. It’s possible that “swimware” doesn’t mean “bathing suits” but “all accoutrements for swimming,” in which case it might be correct, but I’ve never heard that word.
The whole road was dotted with “watch out for bear” signs, as American black bear (Ursus americanus) are fairly common around here.
Tomorrow: a birding trip on which I meet reader and videographer Tara Tanaka,whose videos have often graced this site.
