Encounters With The Unexpected
What unexpected mammal encounters have you all had in Florida?
For me, one of the craziest mammal interactions occurred at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. I was walking down the boardwalk, admiring the enormous bald cypress trees all around me. I heard some splashing in the water beneath the boardwalk and immediately stopped. I thought that the noise came from an alligator, or maybe a large snake that had been startled.
I was wrong.
Two adult river otters with two young swam out from underneath the boardwalk. They were clearly in play mode and simply swam in circles, squeeked, and dove intermittently. But then a really crazy thing happened: they all climbed up onto the boardwalk!
The entire family came up and stood no more than five feet in front of me. They stopped there, made eye contact with me, and walked slowly away on the boardwalk. I rustled to get my camera out and this movement scared them. They slid into the water and I was only able to get photos of them in the water.
I couldn't believe it!
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Our recent unexpected encounter was at Highlands Hammock State Park.
My girls and I spend an hour or so hiking the trails. After walking the Cypress Swamp Cat Walk we were hot and tired. We were anxious to go home. At the end of the long board walk something fell out of a bush near our heads and splashed into the water...a cottonmouth! It had spotted a fish and dropped from his perch right on it. We took pictures and videos of it dragging it to shore and feasting (swallowing it).
The girls said later "Luckily we are people not fish!"
After a few years of home school science field trips they are becoming pros at identifying and observing plants and wildlife. Any many snake and creature encounters.
That's so awesome! And the fact that you turned it into an educational opportunity after it happened, versus running in fear like most people would have done, is even more awesome. Thanks for sharing, Nancy!
Yes, they are becoming fearless adventurers. We even posted one of the pictures here on iNaturalist.org We love sharing what we learn.
I haven't had a lot of mammalian encounters in Florida, but one comes to mind. I really missed the locally unique blonde morph fox squirrels of the University of Texas at Austin where I moved from. So, imagine my excitement when I saw a blonde morph of a gray squirrel on the University of Miami campus. It seems to be a very unique color for this species. I can't find very many pictures of any similarly colored gray squirrels in the US. To my knowledge, there's no unique population at this location, just this one individual. It had babies, but they appeared typically colored.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5414395
That's great! To be reminded of home by a squirrel.
Whoa! That's crazy. It's fascinating how little genetic mutations like that can pop up in scattered locations, yet phenotypically-mirror populations in other, disconnected places.
Yeah, it is very fun to see. I know white-morph gray squirrels are especially popular in the US. There are quite a few places with local populations of white gray squirrels and different populations have different genotypes for that white colour. Some are albino, some are leucistic, and some are neither. It's pretty cool. I'd like to explore some of Florida's fox squirrel population one of these days. The colour variation can be pretty wide and looks very interesting.
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