Tuesday,
July 23: Rivers Road Preserve
One of my summer tasks for Conservation Collier is to check some of the lesser known and lesser used preserves to begin a list of wildlife present, especially insects, to assist with land management plans.
Today I visited Rivers Road Preserve. It's located a little south of Immokalee Road between Collier Boulevard and Wilson Boulevard and is just under 77 acres in size.
The trails wander through a mostly Slash Pine and Cabbage Palm upland although there is one little slough in the middle. Another portion that's not open to the public is a cypress wetland.
During the summer, there's not a lot going on but it's a good place for small birds that will migrate down for the winter.
Today, I found two insects that I had not seen elsewhere. One was the White-footed Leafcutter Bee at the near right and the other was a female Wandering Glider at the far right.
Other
insects, birds, and herps were what would be expected.
Although Black Bear and White-tailed Deer are fairly common and Florida Panthers occasionally pass through, today no mammals were seen or heard. Birds were just the summer regulars.
Only eight species of birds, four of butterflies, and five of dragonflies were identified.
Red-bellied Woodpeckers were the most common followed by Northern Cardinals and Mourning Doves. One little pond was on the eastern side which ought to be a nice foraging area for small wading birds, but none were there.
In the past, Black Racers have been spotted, but this morning the only herps were the alien Brown Anoles and Cuban Treefrogs.
One other sighting that was a little out of the ordinary was the tiny spider at the left. Several of them had webs all in the same area. I think it's one of the Trashline Spiders, but it wasn't possible to tell which one because it was so tiny that no distinguishing marks could be seen with the naked eye, and the light wasn't right to try and get a good close-up photograph.
It was busy reconstructing its nest, in the photo working in a counter-clockwise direction from the outside to the inside.
It's actually a fascinating little web that isn't circular.
Each band stops at the top and reverses, almost like a maze that can be
followed all the way around from outside to inside.
My yard
This week was uncommonly hot and muggy with feel-like temperatures around 105º each day, so other than the trip to Rivers Road Preserve, I didn't do any other hiking and mostly stayed home.
No large mammals appeared on the nighttime trail cameras, just the regular Gray Foxes, Virginia Opossums, and Raccoons. Thursday evening I moved the trail cam in front of the house to a lower level to see if it were missing anything small, and it was. Early Friday morning, a Flying Squirrel bounded across the yard. Those little things are really fast! Here's a two part video of it. The first part shows it at real time and the second part is slow motion, reduced to 10% of the actual time.
Daytime mammals have just been Gray Squirrels, Cottontail Rabbits, and an occasional Hispid Cotton Rat. No new and exciting birds have been seen.
I've been checking the Swallow-tailed Kite pre-migration roost regularly. The photo at the top of the page is from Friday morning when 61 kites were counted. The vegetation at the property, mostly Red Maples, is growing up enough that it now obscures views of any kites that might be in the center of the property.