Ding Darling (8)

I just got home from Ding Darling and I had a blast. The tram tour was educational, relaxing, and surprisingly quite fun. My tour guide was Lewis Irvine from Tarpon Bay Explorers and was very knowledgeable. One of the first things we talked about was how quickly the habitats can change in areas like this. Within two-hundred feet of the start of the tram tour we passed through three different habitats: Pine Flatwoods, Salt Marsh, and finally into the estuary where the majority of the tour took place. After the changing environment, we learned that the road we were on was actually called a spoil road and was created using the mud and dirt taken from the man-made “barrow ditches” on either side of the road. After the man-made road, the only other man made thing we saw on the preserves were designed to control mosquito populations (shown below). These were developed to control the amount of water in the shallow parts of the estuaries and keep the flats flooded at all times, which in turn would destroy the mosquitos breeding habitat.

I grew up here in Southwest Florida so I knew or had seen most of the different plants and birds we saw/talked about on the tour. We saw everything from Red, White and Black mangroves to Sable palms and Spanish Bayonets (Spanish Bayonet shown below).

My favorite part of the tour was seeing the young osprey cleaning has talons after eating a fish. I have seen many osprey growing up, but I had never seen one dip down barely above the water and clean his talons before returning to his spot in the trees. It was interesting to see and what made the trip for me was seeing another osprey sitting on the bridge leaving Sanibel, I drove right past him and had never been so close to one in my life.

The inside at Ding Darling was pretty neat too. They had different habitats set up and information about the animals in each. I personally liked the kids cartoon contest and all of Ding’s cartoons they had displayed.