Sunday at the Park

I spent a big chunk of the afternoon today at the Lake Eola park. Its the jewel of downtown Orlando. If you've ever seen a travel photo of Orlando that didn't involve a theme park, it was probably a picture of this lake with a big fountain in the middle of it and tall buildings in the background.

A more perfect day for human enjoyment has surely never occurred on this planet. I got myself a tasty bar-b-q sandwich from the little cafe and ate my lunch under a tree along the shore. A white great egret waded past me about ten feet away and got himself lunch right there on the spot. He shot his stiletto head into the water like a spear gun and came up with a tiny fish he gobbled up and then wadded off in search of seconds. The lake is a popular spot for many species of birds. An old haggard looking black swan was sitting on a nest of eggs. She looked kinda old for raising kids. I wondered if any birds are ever born with down syndrome. I suppose they wouldn't be able to fly but they'd just love all the other birds to death. Then I started wondering how all these critters found enough to eat every day and why they don't seem to get all the nasty diseases that we people get. And they have no health care! A momma mallard swam by with 14 ducklings swimming along behind her. I counted them twice. And she never even got prenatal vitamins! Poppa mallard was swimming along nearby looking pretty proud.

I've always enjoyed watching seagulls fly. They are such nimble aerobats and have such wonderfully shaped high aspect ratio wings (long and slender for you non-pilots). They remind me of little miniature white German high performance sailplanes, only way higher tech with the variable geometry wing and tail surfaces and all. They seem to always be hungry, always looking for a bite of something, but sometimes it seems they just soar and swoop and fly just for the fun of it. If I was one, that's what I'd be doing a lot of. Lake Eola has hundreds of them. Kids feed them bread and when that is going on there are great clouds of gulls maneuvering for a crumb.

Today I noticed something I really hadn't paid attention to before. These birds can fly pretty fast and often do so in a huge flock in extremely close proximity to each other. But even though they might all be flying different directions in a chaotic traffic pattern that would give an air traffic controller a coronary, they never seem run into each other. They seem to know what the fellow next to them is going to do and not only do they not collide and tumble out of the sky, they move around each other and along in formation with the grace of ballet dancers. I wonder why people can't move around each other without banging into each other and getting all annoyed. This morning as I drove out of the subdivision, another guy entering the roadway from the opposite side nearly clobbered me. It seems he required both lanes at the same time. I had to drive halfway off the road to avoid getting the entire right side of my car crunched. We don't seem to be very graceful around each other an awful lot of the time. When we see a group of humans moving among each other with grace, we call it art. When seagulls do it, they all it lunch.

Some people think seagulls are just a small step above pigeons, but I think they are just fabulous. But if you prefer, there are some beautiful iridescent feathered pigeons at Lake Eola, as well as white and black swans, several species of ducks, grebes, egrets, ibis, anhingas, the common backyard birds, as well as the occasional sandhill crane, stork, or great blue heron. Florida is a great place for bird lovers.