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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Manatees Crossing

In the 10 years that I previously lived in Florida, I never spotted a manatee in the wild. Seems kind of strange, since I've always lived near the water, but yet it's true. Now that I'm back in Florida for Round Two, I made it one of my (many) goals to find them. Last weekend, I took a slight detour to the Manatee Viewing Center in the hopes of spotting a sea cow.


That sign pretty much shows you all that you can see of the manatees, and more than what I was able to capture with my simple point-and-shoot camera, as evidenced by the following pictures.
There should have been a flipper here.

And a snout here.

Probably another flipper here.

You get the idea.

Manatees don't leap and flip like dolphins, so the best view I could get of their whole selves was when they hovered very, very closely to the surface.

I caught a snout!

What's up with the brown squiggles across the water?, you ask. They're reflections of these unhealthy-looking things.

After just a few more attempts of trying to capture some manatee action with my camera, I gave up and just hung over the railing of the walkway, waiting for more snouts and flippers to pop out of the water. It was a nice, sunny day, and it was a time and a place where it just didn't matter whether or not I got any decent pictures. It just mattered that I was there, in the sun, on the water, watching manatees bob and float and peek out of the water. I was content (almost as content as a manatee).


Now to find some wild dolphins...

2 comments:

  1. This is so lovely! I'm from New York so we certianly dont have any manettes around there but I've always wanted to see some in real life! It understandable why they are often hurt by boats-you can barely see them unfortunatly!

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  2. I snorkled with Manatees once and it was awesome! :)

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