Wow, thank you for posting the pictures! Very interesting

Beautiful pictures. It is so sad that most people never get a chance or never take the time to stop and appreciate the beauty of nature

Great pictures, Kara! I've never been able to catch a hummer on camera. Good for you! Love the anhingas, and of course, the gators. Little gators are so cute.

I THINK your wasps are paper wasps, as the nest looks right. I can't really tell about the wasps themselves, but judging from that nest, that would be my guess.

When I canoed the Wekiva weekly, that was the only thing I did NOT want to get close to. And there were wasp nest on every over-hanging palmetto frond, it seemed. In my garden, we have a truce, but running into their nest with the front of a canoe always seemed like a real bad idea to me.

Thanks for sharing! Sounds like you had a wonderful time!

Marcia

Thank goodness you did not hit the wasp nest!

Great pics! I don't know what I liked more..the hummer, the otter or the gators!

Great pictures, especially the anhingas. I've never seen the young before.

I forgot to comment on the shade structure...looks like they were missing their evergreen trees from the north woods! How cute!

Marcia

all your photos were sensational!
Wasps! This has been my worst year with them.I keep getting stung.They have nests everwhere including on my rose bushes!

Wonderful pictures, I have fond memories of tubing the Rainbow when there were not many houses on it, I even have a purple-tinged whiskey bottle I found in the sandy river bottom, A.H. Rawlins, Fine Old Whiskeys, Tampa Florida...sorry, the older I get the more I reminisce about my days growing up here....Nice to see the otters are still around :-)

Those hummers are hard to capture on camera. I never see them perched ... only quickly darting between nectar sources. Isn't Florida a wonderful place for so much wildlife and so many beautiful places to enjoy it!

From what I've read you have to really aggravate a paper wasp to cause it to sting. They are non-aggressive. I let them make their homes under the eaves of my house because they eat many of the bugs that are enemies to my lawn.

Those anhinga chicks are really interesting... almost as big as their mom.

Sounds like a great day.
Meems

Having grown up with paper wasps, I see them somewhat differently. While they leave me alone in the garden, if their nest gets bumped (like in a canoe), they will defend it vigorously, and their stings are really painful. I don't think of them as non-aggressive, but rather as being very aggressive if you give them cause, and willing to leave you alone if you don't.

Now mud daubers or dirt daubers have always seemed to me to be much more passive. I've been stung many times over the years by paper wasps, mostly as a child, but never by a mud dauber, even when I was knocking down their nests from doorways, etc.

But worst of all are hornets. Oh, my. You do NOT want to bump into a hornet's nest (the ones that look like big paper footballs). Hornets and yellow jackets seem to me to be far more aggressive than the other wasps I'm familiar with. Eeeek.

Right after we moved into this house, we had yellow jackets suddenly appearing all over the INSIDE of our windows. We were told they probably had a nest inside the walls and that it could be huge. But they started dying on their own shortly thereafter, and never came back. I was sweeping up piles of yellow jacket bodies for weeks. We were lucky that they expired on their own, I reckon. Might have been a very different story if they had hung around long.

Marcia

Wonderful pictures! Thanks!
I rarely see otters and it's always a joy to find them.

Kate

When it comes to Yellow Jackets it never ceases to amaze me how they'll show up and don't think anything at all about sharing your meal with you at a picnic, they'll land on your plate and eat right along with you, very docile then, but stumble into a ground nest and you could easily get killed....

Beautiful Pics!! What camera did ya use? Also where is that river?

What great photos! Especially love the anhinga family. Sounds like a wonderful time... just my cup of tea. Looking at your pics makes me almost feel like I went along with you. Thanks!

Anna

I'm glad you all enjoyed the pictures. It was a very fun day on the river!

The closest larger town to the Rainbow river is Dunnellon which is in the southwest corner of Marion county. We rented the pontoon boat in Dunnellon and the went up a short stretch of the Withlacotchee river to get to the Rainbow. It's amazing the difference in the color of the water between the two rivers. Since the Rainbow is spring fed the water was amazingly clear but as soon as your back in the Withlacotchee the water turns a very dark brown from all the leaf and plant material staining it.
This is the Rainbow river...

And this is the Withlacotchee river.

Tomcath, you'll be happy to know that there were plenty of otters on the river. They were just hard to photograph before they dove underwater.