Some spring observations

My husband, the pets and I spend our winters in Naples, Florida, which is not exactly the nature lover's paradise that we have at our house in the woods in North Carolina. In our winter home subdivision everyone lives in a motorhome or (like us) in a small modular home. There are about 500 tiny homesites around a little lake and it's kind of pretty in a perfectly manicured kind of way.





When I need a nature fix, I usually head to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary or the Nature Conservancy.

But yesterday I found an observation site right here in our park. Our little clubhouse backs up to some woods (which amazingly haven't been covered with concrete... yet), and I pulled a lawn chair under a tree and spent a couple of hours there with my camera and binoculars. I saw lots of "pairs": pileated woodpeckers, blue jays, mourning doves, great crested flycatchers, and these two lizards on the fence:

The next photo shows the boy lizard puffing out his "throat thing". I wish I had a video, because it was very cute how his throat puffing was preceded by a few push-ups. I guess if I was a girl lizard, I might be impressed.






I took dozens of photos of the Great Crested Flycatchers, but almost all of them were under-exposed. This was one of the "least bad".