Marie and I flew to Tampa, Florida in mid-February for a great visit with Marie’s dad Ron, stepmom Nancy, and older brother Matt.

We spent over a week with Ron and Nancy, who live in a sprawling 55+ senior community.  Their ranch-style home is surrounded by 1,500 nearly-identical homes, each painted white, each with a well-maintained lawn and tile roof.  Mailboxes, it turns out, are one of the few options for expressing individuality in an otherwise homogeneous environment that embraces a very specific, very Florida aesthetic.

 

 

I felt like we’d been transported to the Bizarro version of Silver Gate, Montana.  The weather, the people, the architecture, the flora and fauna – all complete opposites.  Back home, Marie and I are the only people who walk around with a little white dog.  In Ron and Nancy’s neighborhood, everyone we saw had a little white dog (often being taken for a ride in a golf cart).  I hadn’t known it was possible to experience such a jarring level of culture shock without leaving the United States.

 

 

We had a lot of fun catching up with Ron, Nancy, and Nancy’s sister Patty (who lives in the same community), and I was really glad to meet Marie’s brother Matt.  It was also my first time meeting Ron and Nancy’s new puppy Snickers, who won me over immediately.  We took walks, went for golf cart rides, hung out at the beach, and had one great meal after another.

 

 

 

Whenever we travel I enjoy trying local beers, and this trip was no exception.

 

 

Aside from spending time with Marie’s family, I had two main goals for our Florida trip: 1) see manatees in the wild, and 2) see burrowing owls in the wild.  Both would be firsts for me.

A couple days after we arrived, Marie and I drove to Three Sisters Springs in Crystal River, where in colder months manatees often gather by the hot springs to warm up.  But, foolishly, we didn’t call ahead, and the area had been so balmy lately that there were no manatees around.  Luckily for us the weather took a turn, and a week later we were able to see big groups of manatees huddled near the springs.

 

 

Finding burrowing owls was a little easier.  Cape Coral, we learned, has the largest population of burrowing owls in Florida – so many that they’re basically everywhere.  The town uses PVC pipe to mark their nests, so whenever you see white pipes sticking up in an open field it means you’ve found burrowing owls.  I didn’t realize that the owls are mostly seen at dawn and dusk, so when we arrived at noon we struggled to find any activity at the nests.  Thankfully we managed to stumble across one brave soul enjoying the mid-day sun and another just inside the shade of its nest.

 

 

 

 

We waited patiently for the sun to drop, and just as the light finally turned golden an owl couple popped up from their burrow in a field by the public library.

 

 

We brought our little Maltese with us to Tampa, and he handled the flights better than we expected.  He loved the seemingly inexhaustible supply of dog treats at Ron and Nancy’s place, and he enjoyed the break from Silver Gate’s freezing weather.  But Snickers wore him out, and he was relieved when we finally arrived back home.

Wildlife sightings in Yellowstone were slow for me in the weeks before and after our Florida trip.  Pygmy owls, which were everywhere in January and the first part of February, seemed to mostly vanish for reasons that nobody has been able to fully explain.  My last decent chance to get pygmy owl photos came when my friend Nick and I watched a pygmy catch a rodent near Elk Creek.  We scrambled up a snowy hillside for a better view of the owl eating its catch.

 

 

Still on the hillside, Nick spotted an ermine darting around a tree stump.  My luck with ermines has been terrible this winter (although Nick would no doubt blame insufficient effort on my part rather than bad luck), and I was thrilled to have a chance to watch one, even just for a brief time.

 

 

 

 

 

The approaching transition from winter to spring is such a fun time to be in Yellowstone.  People have already seen bluebirds and the first grizzlies of the year.  In April we’ll start spotting red dogs (newborn bison) and bear cubs.  (Two tiny black bear cubs-of-the-year have already been making appearances at the opening of the den near Tower Junction.)  And not long after that, hopefully, the northern range wolf packs will welcome some new pups.