Thanks @Youssef_Ismail , @Steve_Kennedy , @Mark_Seaver , & @Jens_Ober!
Youssef - Hi! Long time, no talk to! I hope you’re doing well. Yes, I wish the Moorhen was “posed” a little differently, but they just refuse to take direction! LOL.
Mark - Actually, the reason for the peace & quiet are the gators. They tend to keep swimmers at bay! LOL. Truthfully, gators seldom bother people. They have a natural fear of people. The problem arises when dumb humans try and feed them, thinking that is somehow cute. That’s against the law in Florida, but idiots will be idiots. Once a gator loses it’s natural fear of humans, then it can become dangerous, and we are seeing a definite increase in the number of gator attacks because of that. Unfortunately, the gators don’t attack the people feeding them, they attack the people who are not feeding them. A gator’s brain is only about the size of a walnut, so there’s not a lot of high level thinking going on there. They act out of instinct. They are amazingly smart (in their own way) and fill their role in nature beautifully until humans become involved and screw things up, as usual.
Jens, I agree with your comment about the right side of the frame being too tight. There needs to be more room there, but I was twisting around in the boat and just didn’t twist far enough it seems. Wish I had gone a little further!
Jens - Yes, I have seen a tremendous change (for the worse) in the past 50 years. Florida has the largest concentration of fresh water springs in the world. They are crystal clear and so beautiful, or I should say, They used to be crystal clear and so beautiful. Some of them still are, but SO MANY have suffered great degradation over the years. Our aquifer is being depleted by over pumping for agriculture and bottled water. The use of too much fertilizer over the years has caused a high level of nitrate pollution in the water now and that is causing what used to be beautiful underwater flora to be covered over with dense algae which is covering everything and killing the plants. Water visibility has gone down a great deal over the years, and human usage has risen drastically over the past 50 years. As a teenager I can remember camping on a certain spring fed river for several days at a time and never seeing another person; today that same spot is now a state park and the amount of people is limited to 3000 people A DAY. It’s now people everywhere you look. Without that limit, it would be completely overrun with many more thousands. Many springs have a greatly reduced water flow, and many have stopped flowing completely because of the overpumping, and our greedy, stupid politicians are still not doing ANYTHING to protect them. They boast about saving them, but they are lying through their teeth. The NATURAL part of Florida is dying an increasingly fast death, and our politicians don’t seem to care as they are all bought and paid for by the big corporations (Big Ag, Phosphate Mining, and Water companies like Nestle (Nestle is TERRIBLE). I feel like crying every time I visit the spots of my youth. We have a lot of grassroots conservation groups fighting for my state, but it is almost impossible to beat the big money corporations when the state government is in their pockets. Nevertheless, we will keep fighting!
