Seabird Rescue

We were having our morning coffee yesterday morning and Al noticed a Cormorant sitting on the dock with one wing kind of spread out at an odd angle. 

Cormorants often spread both wings out in order to dry them, but  this one looked kind of odd.

After a while, the bird still hadn’t moved so we went out for a closer look, and found out he was injured.  It appeared he may have had a broken left wing.

Al and I believe if you find an injured animal, then you should help it, so I got on the internet to try to find a Seabird Rescue group in this area. 

I ended up calling a seabird rescue group in Miami, because I couldn’t get an answer anywhere else.  They referred me to a lady in Tallahassee, so I called and left her a message.

In the meantime we checked with Lynn,  the owner of this campground to see if she knew of any one here that could help the bird.

She called around but we never could find anyone who could help us with this bird.  We were still waiting for response back from a few people, but in the meantime, the bird disappeared.  He was sitting on the dock for 5 or 6 hours, right in plain sight, but suddenly he was gone.  We looked around up and down the coast and even offshore, but never saw him again.  We don’t think something got him and we sure didn’t see any animal rescue people come, so we don’t know where he could have gone.  We  didn’t think was able to fly.

His wing looked broken, but I am choosing to believe he is going to be okay, and that he flew off.

We ended up getting a pretty strong afternoon thunderstorm with some pea sized hail.  In Florida it is common  to get daily afternoon storms in the summer.  The hot air mass over land meets up with the cooler air from the water and boom…thunderstorms.  They last a few minutes then the sun comes back out.  Some can be extremely violent though, especially in the Tampa area, which is known as the lightning capitol of the world!

In Tampa,  people frequently get killed by lightning.  I remember a few in particular that freaked me out.  One was a lady talking on a phone inside her kitchen..lightning struck and killed her.  One was a tourist rollerblading at a place we rollerbladed often, it was a bright sunny day, but a lightning bolt appeared to come out of nowhere and killed him dead.  So when I hear thunder and see lightning, I get a little nervous, but today’s storm, wasn’t too bad and moved off pretty quickly.

After the storm, it was real cool out, almost to where we needed a sweater :)

We started packing up in preparation for our departure.  We loaded the kayaks, so no more early morning kayak trips.

We finished up our last evening here,  having tacos for dinner, watching Dancing with the Stars and  Two and a Half Men. 

It stayed cool all night and we slept very well.

Today, we have to head home, and I have a sneaking suspicion that our grass may need to be mowed :) .

We’re anxious to see how our garden fared and if the squirrels ate all of our peaches.  I’m sure our birds will ber hungry since they haven’t been fed for a while.