I found this little guy sitting on a tree on the way out

I got to make another trip to Robinson Preserve a couple of days ago, this time with a friend specifically to go photographing.  I only shot with my 70-200 f/4 this time, and it turned out surprisingly well, for the short focal length.  Hopefully next time, though, I’ll have access to a 400 f/5.6 again, which will give me an awfully better view of the wildlife.  In the meantime, I made do well enough at 200mm, just had to be a little bit sneaky with the assorted creatures (birds, mostly).  And, of course, there was a little bit of cropping involved in post processing, but I guess that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

A bee taking off from a flower

The trip was good fun, and I managed to make an entire circuit around one side of the park (the one that stretches out to Tampa Bay).  Perhaps next time we can go the other way, down to the causeway to Anna Maria.  Towards the entrance of the park, there isn’t a whole lot in the way of tree cover, so we mostly stuck to photographing the insects that flew around the various flowers and grasses.  Moving on a little further, we came to the watery part of the park, where we managed to catch some birds hanging around the water, and even a couple of them in flight, skimming over the water or soaring up in the skies (the former proved easier to photograph).  Then we trekked on through the mangroves and marshey areas, and found a nice little flock of ibis pecking their way around in the water.

A white heron, flying just above the water

The park itself is still looking just as pleasant as always, and they seem to be making process on the visitor center (which they’re putting in an old, dilapidated house) and the camp site.  I also noticed that they’ve added dispensers with doggy bags, which I’m pretty sure was my mother’s doing.  Apparently she took the dogs for a walk there one day, and they did their business, whereupon my mom realized she was out of bags.  By amazing coincidence, she ran into a woman who took issue with the situation, and despite my mom having gone to her car to fetch a bag with which to clean up the mess, managed to get a park ranger to issue her a ticket for failing to pick up after the dogs.  So, in any case, she complained about it, and got them to put in dog bag dispensers.

A great blue heron, framed up by mangroves

And, with the exception of the dog bag drama, I don’t believe anything else of any great consequence has really been going on.  Robinson preserve continues to be awesome, just like always, and with any luck I’ll get a good chance to thoroughly explore the other part of the park sometime later in the Summer.  The other way isn’t circuitous, but rather lets out onto the causeway to the island, so I’m thinking some sort of a switchup with vehicles might be ideal.  That is, park one car at the park entrance, put two people in another, drive it down to the causeway entrance, walk all the way through to the main entrance, and then drive back to the other car.  Or something like that.  I’ll leave that planning to another day, and for now settle with the images I have.