Just boarded the tour boat.
One of the first bits of wildlife we saw--a mother wood duck and her ducklings. So adorable!
Lots of pretty scenery on this river.
Here's a common moorhen with her chicks.
Hundreds of whirligig beetles on the water. Very interesting to watch them buzzing around on the surface of the water.
An anhinga bird. They look a bit like a cormorant. They fish by out-swimming a fish and spearing it with its beak.
A little heron.
Another anhinga in a tree.
Our first spotting of an alligator. You can see his face in the lower-middle right of the picture.
A heron, and what I think might be a moorhen. It was super cool how many birds we saw. The pictures we took are just a tiny sample of what we saw but it covers most of the species we spotted.
This is a great egret. So beautiful and pristine!
Several turtles in a row on a log. The tour guide called it the "shell station". :-)
A heron again.
Alligator!
Another common moorhen.
This (I believe) cypress is said to be 500 years old.
Another gator.
An anhinga again.
In the bottom right corner you can see into the water...it was pretty clear most of the time, thought it was difficult to get that to show up in pictures because of the reflections.
An alligator hiding in the plants on the surface.
This is known as the "Tarzan tree"...Tarzan movies were done here in the 1940's. I guess this was "his" tree. More of a stump now. But here are two turtles sunning on it!
A whole lot of fish!
The crowning discovery for us on this boat tour: getting to see a manatee! Here's when we first spotted it. I didn't know if I would get any better pictures of it.
But I did! We came alongside it and it was right next to the boat.
(If you haven't clicked for close-ups on the other pictures, which you should have, you really should on this one!)
The diving platform thingy.
The boat we rode. Named for a bird called a limpkin, which we didn't see but I found out on Wikipedia that its call was used for jungle sound effects on Tarzan movies, and also for the hippogriff on Harry Potter!
It was so hot this day (though on the boat it was not too bad since we were shaded and had a breeze) so after a picnic lunch, we were happy to go indoors to the Lodge, built, if I understood right, by Edward Ball, who bought Wakulla Springs in the early '30's.
Pretty architecture.
Beautiful painting done on the inside.
"Old Joe," a 12-foot alligator that was killed unprovoked many years ago. They found his body and stuffed it, but apparently never found the killer (?)
This movie was also filmed at Wakulla Springs!
After some nice cool time in air conditioning and visiting the gift shop, we headed over to the playground.
