San Felasco State Park Bike and Hike

I did a 6-hour,12-mile bike and hike around the NE portion of San Felasco State Park Sunday yesterday, picked up some interesting GPS points. It was a good, cool day in a primo Florida mixed hardwood forest and I really enjoyed it. While sitting on the ground eating my lunch, a 4-point white-tailed deer run almost straight up to me until it saw me about 30ft away and stopped. Wide-eyed, he didn’t know at first what to do, as I remained still, but then he bounded away. The find of the day was a terrific rat snake, as best as I can figure an intergrade between the gray rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta spiloides) and the yellow rat snake (Elaphe obsolete quadrivittata). It was fully 7 feet long and 1.75 inches in diameter, perhaps the largest rat snake I have ever seen in the Florida wilds. It was stretched across the park bike trail. I stopped to photograph it and move it out of the way of further bike traffic. As I bent down to pick it up, the snake retracted into a coil beside the trail and then raised itself up into this imperious image:


Another interesting find was a nest or bedding platform, or something like that, put together by some kind of wildlife in a marsh. It was composed of the large grass (Poaceae) species dominating the marsh and did not look like it had been deposited there by running water (the marsh is in a karst-origin expansion of an otherwise well-defined stream floodplain):