A Month in Caladesi Island State Park

It is amazing how fast time flies when you are thoroughly enjoying what you are doing! We sadly left Caladesi Island State Park last Friday. It is one of the few places that has completely “bewitched” us with its pure natural beauty and its abundance of many different varieties of colorful shore birds, many of which are on the “threatened list” of birds in America, and its variety of plants, both flowering and non-flowering.

A wooden boardwalk leads from the park’s marina, through a wide area of sand dunes with beach grasses and coastal plants, which form natural nesting areas for many varieties of water birds, gopher tortoise, and sea turtles. The boardwalk ends at the beautiful white sugar-fine sand beach that has made Caladesi Island famous.

The park’s beach has been rated as one of the best beaches in the nation for many years and it is known for outstanding shelling. Many mornings and evenings were spent walking the beach collecting shells, admiring shore birds, picking up trash, sharing conversation with other “beach combers”, and enjoying sunsets. The magnificent Gulf of Mexico helped to set the mood, peaceful and inviting at times and rough and threatening at other times. By mid-March the water was perfect for swimming as many northerners, such as us, enjoyed its warmth while many southerners watched on in horror. I overheard a conversation as a couple laughed at the “crazy tourists who were actually swimming”. Crazy we may be, but it certainly felt good!

The nature hiking trail and the mangrove-kayaking trail are also on our list of island favorites.

The hiking trail passed over a dune tidal pool, called a “cat’s eye” pond, which we quickly discovered is a perfect place to look for wading birds. For the first time we saw roseate spoonbills, tri-colored herons, and reddish egrets.

We learned that the reddish egret is the rarest heron in America and that there are only about 400 pairs in Florida. Like the Great Blue Heron, the Reddish Egret has two major varieties, the dark morph and the white morph, both outstandingly beautiful!

Reddish Egret, White Morph

Reddish Egret, Dark Morph

Another one of our favorite birds is the oyster catcher; once again there are only about 400 pairs in Florida and at least three pairs at Caladesi Island Park. Some days when we walked the beach we were lucky enough to see all three pair, each pair had a different beach area to call home.

Oyster catcher

The grassy area near the marina is a common place to find armadillos after sunset and gopher tortoises during the heat of day. The gopher tortoise is another declining species and is protected by law. We had never seen either of these animals before.

Armadillo

Gopher Tortoise

Great Blue Heron

The 108 slip marina was frequently visited by both water birds and

dolphin catching fish and by catfish cleaning the bottoms of boats.

There was rarely a dull moment! Add to that the colorful sunrises and sunsets and you've got a perfect formula for enjoyment.

Sunrise

Sunset

We frequently found animals or plants that we had no idea what they were. The park rangers were always willing to help us identify our findings and they encouraged us to look through their collection of books of nature such as reptiles,

birds,












shells, flowers,



Florida Wildlife, etc.

Lizard Shedding his Skin

As former teachers, we greatly appreciated the rangers’ efforts to help us learn more about the new environment that we were experiencing and enjoying. We were surprised to see the difference between “northern lupine” and southern lupine”. The southern ones have a very different leaf and a bit of a fuzzy covering over the green parts. They are very showy and add a bit of color to the beach scrub areas where cabbage palm, saw palmetto, and wax myrtle are the predominate vegetation.


Caladesi Island was first settled in the early 1890’s by a homesteader from Switzerland, Henry Scharrer. In order for him to set up a homestead on the island he had to be a US citizen, live on the land for five years, and make sufficient improvements to the land, such as a livable house, cleared land, and planted fields. He married an Irish woman who was working in Dunedin as a companion to a wealthy lady from Cleveland. In 1895 they had a baby girl they named Myrtle after the wax myrtle plant that is common on the island. After Myrtle was grown and married, she eventually moved back to the island. Some of their old home foundations still exist. The path that leads back to Myrtle’s old home passes by several old osprey nests. While we were there one of the old nests was being used by a great horned owl and her two owlets. Bill and I checked the nest on a regular basis and were rewarded by seeing not only the very young, nearly white owlets with their ever watchful mother or father and then later the well colored ready to “fly away” older owlets without their watchful parent. We actually saw them away from their nest the day before they left the nest for good. What fun!
We had the good fortune of meeting an English artist, Trevor Crompton, who was vacationing in Clearwater Beach, FL. We had many "chats on the beach" and we shared some of our bird and owl photos with him. The day before he flew back to England he gave us a very life-like watercolor painting done from one of our photos. We are hoping to see him again next winter when we'll probably all be back at Caladesi Island for a few days.

Bill Working on Barge

In order to stay at Caladesi for such a long time we had to do volunteer work. Bill’s main duties involved tearing up a wooden walkway, which was suffering from old age and which had many splinters and rotten wood sections, and replacing it with a paver brick walkway near the educational kiosks. He and Neil, a volunteer from Vermont, did a super job on the walkway. Mary’s main duties involved office work, answering phones, collecting fees for boat slip usage, and occasional computer work. Both of us also worked as campground hosts by helping boaters dock and just walking around talking to other guests. We helped keep the beach and trails “trash free”. Whenever something needed doing, we tried to help.

An Approaching Storm

The rangers were marvelous. They went out of their way to be sure we got to do the fun jobs and not only the essential ones. They arranged a boat trip for us to Anclote Key and Three Rooker Island, both major bird-nesting areas,
and also had the ranger on Anclote Key give us a guided tour of the newly restored lighthouse on the island.

View from Anclote Key Lighthouse

We did an early morning kayak trip to the north island in the park to be sure the bird nesting signs and flags were in place. The nesting season for wading birds is just getting underway, so signs and roping off areas is essential. We’re hoping that when we pass through this week that more nesting will be obvious.

Since we left Caladesi Island State Park last week we’ve gone about a hundred miles south to Punta Gorda where we attended a MTOA rendezvous. There were about 170 boaters there and we all attended seminars, socialized, and had a good time. The rendezvous ended Sunday morning, but it was rainy and windy, so we decided to stay one more night before heading back north. After we leave the rendezvous we have two goals in sight, Caladesi Island for a couple of nights and then we’ll head back to Mobile and up the Tenn-Tom Waterway and the Black Warrior River. We will be leaving the boat in Tuscaloosa for the summer, about 337 miles north of Mobile, AL and will be driving the truck back to Rhode Island.