We celebrated Easter at the Episcopal Cathedral in Orlando. It was a beautiful building with a marvelous organ and choir. The music was well chosen and the opening hymn was especially stirring, bringing the right triumphant and joyful tone to the day. Of course, we missed celebrating at home, but we had made the decision to try it this Easter after observing the other Holy Week services back home.
After mass, we went birding at Wekiwa Springs State Park north of Orlando, where little avian jewels continued the anthems of praise in their own racing trills and crescendos. Northern Parulas and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers were the most prolific in the park, and while their music accompanied us for most of the day, we were also treated to the music of Northern Cardinals, Pine Warblers, Gray Catbirds and Tufted Titmice.
We went there in search of two species that we didn't find: Carolina Chickadee and Red-headed Woodpecker. We scoured the parking lot area for the Chickadees, looked high and low, listened carefully, but we couldn't find them. Still, the park itself is gorgeous and we didn't regret the trip. Other birds in the area included a calling Barred Owl that only Libby heard, Great-crested Flycatchers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers and a close fly-by of a Pileated Woodpecker. Those things are enormous!
Its main feature of the park is a giant walled in natural spring that comes out in quantity and force sufficient to be the headwaters of the Wekiwa River. So many people came that day to swim in it that they closed the park by 3:00 that afternoon as we were leaving. Before that, though, we headed a few miles north to a parking lot and trail head for lunch to escape the crowds. While there we were treated to three Swallow-tailed Kites playing in the air over a burned out patch of forest. Libby and I have both decided that this was the most breathtaking new bird we saw in Florida.
We also took a short walk into a new habitat for us. Florida has large tracts of pine forest that form open cathedral-like galleries with a brilliant green understory of saw palmetto. Each pine is narrow and sparsely needled, so there's a lot of open air and light. It's obviously a very fire dependent ecosystem, and a beautiful one, too, giving a true sense of depth in Florida's very flat landscape. On Monday we would visit a more extensive tract of forest like this, but more on that tomorrow!
There are more pictures on Flickr.
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