Sand Sculpture Mermaids, Sanibel Island

People ca't resist making sand sculptures on the beach. It used to be castles, but now I see a lot of other really elegant sculptures with beach bling to enhance them. Other beach combers enjoy looking at them,too, so it brings a lot of joy.

This Mama Mermaid has seaweed hair, and such an elegant color! Her shell necklace has a worn center from a fighting conch as a pendent and her scales are represented by dozens of bivalves.She is protected by a circle of Pen Shells.

This young mermaid was close by. Her hair is portrayed by a string of egg cases. Univalve shells like conchs, welks, and tulips lay their eggs in tough cases in long strings and attach them to some underwater feature. The attachment may not be stable and may rip loose and the waves will fling the egg cases up on the shore. Holding the cases up to the light you can see dozens of tiny shells in the cases. Most of the ones I have examined had 3 to 6 baby shells in each little disk. Each shell is typically about the size of a pin head and the disk is filled with fluid. The cases themselves are very tough and good luck on trying to break one open with your fingers.I have thrown ones that still had fluid back into the water, but without being attached, I imagine they end up back on the beach again.

Gopher Tortoise

During a trip to Sanibel Island , Florida in July I saw this gopher tortoise grazing along the grassy strip between the paved bike path and the road. Several people had stopped to observe him (her) and one person was attempting to use his bike as a barricade to keep it from wandering out into the road. I doubt it would have done that anyway, because it was clearly there to eat and there was no grass in the road. The interesting thing about this creature to me was it was biting off grass with a vengeance and the ripping grass blades made the same sound they do when a cow is grazing. It was completely unperturbed by the crowd that gathered around it. I suppose it was used to being on display.
Gopher tortoises eat grass, legumes, fruits and other assorted plant materials. The younger ones eat more legumes, probably to increase the protein needed for growth. A typical gopher tortoise needs about 4 acres of territory and may dig several burrows. The burrow may be as long as 48 feet and 3 feet deep. The burrow protects the tortoise from fire, heat , and cold, and predators. They share their burrows with up to 360 different animals (not all at once!). They spend most of their time in the burrow and are solitary except during mating season. They reach sexual maturity at 12-15 years and some reports claim they can live 100 years. (Others say 40 years.)

Sanibel Island in July

Sanibel Island is a special place to me.  Sometimes I just have to relax and let the joy of it seep in.

 Below is a sample of the shells we found in July. There seemed to be an extra number of small beautiful shells. One day there were a lot of fighting conchs (the orange larger shell on the bottom left), but for the most part the shells were smaller, but maybe more interesting for being smaller. See that piece of Junonia on the left side just above the green thing and 2 cones? Hannah found several pieces, but a whole shell for her is still elusive.

If you want to see a whole Junonia, and learn more about it , you can look here.

Wow!!! I'm Famous!

Well, not exactly. On a recent trip to Florida to visit my favorite shelling place (Sanibel Island) I met my favorite blogger on the beach. She writes the blog I Love Shelling. I have been reading her blog almost daily for more than a year. Her blog is about (what else) shelling on Sanibel, and especially during the winter, I get my sunshine fix from her blog. She came up and started talking to Hannah, EJ, and me and then put our pictures on her blog. The rig you see in the background of the picture of us (scan down a bit) is the one doing the dredging to deepen the inlet between Sanibel and Captiva known as Blind Pass. A giant sandbar had built up out in the water so that the inlet had slowed to an almost trickle. The inlet feeds the waters of Ding Darling Wildlife Preserve and other connecting natural areas. These areas are a favorite birding place for wading and shore birds and almost anytime you can see groups of pink spoonbills feeding there, occasionally you can see Flamingoes. All kinds of herons and ibis are there as well.

Hunting Heron

 

This is another of my Sanibel Island pictures from the past year. it stood completely motionless staring at something I could not see in the grass. We watched it for at least half an hour as we were looking at some other birds in the area also. The intensity of it's concentration certainly should be rewarded, hopefully with a morsel of food, but I never saw it get anything.

Heron

 

This heron looks like it is getting in a little deep. This is from my Sanibel trip in July

Wind Swept Tree

 

This is a beautiful wind carved tree on Pine Island , Caya Costa

Sanibel island is Noted for Shells

 

This picture gives you an idea of the number if not the diversity of shells at Sanibel Island, Florida. The beach is littered with caches of shells, even mounds in places. Having just returned from a wonderful few days there, it is very fresh in my mind, even though there were fewer shells there this time than any other time I have been. One woman on the beach said there were fewer shells in the fall than any other season. She did not say why. There were still gobs of shells but they tended to be much smaller in size. In a mound like the one pictured here we found tiny conchs, tulips and several other spiral kinds of shells. I did find a huge lightning whelk (about a foot long), but it had a live animal in it and taking live shells is prohibited. It had apparently been washed up in the tide and was digging down in the sand to escape the sun when I found it. (I will post that picture later.)After admiring it we waded out as far as possible and tossed it as far out as we could to make sure it did not come ashore again.