It isn’t enough to just go wandering around in the woods.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I do love to wander aimlessly at times, but a full sojourn
simply must produce treasures. I guess it’s a holdover from my youth, looking
for Easter eggs. Yesterday, I again went hiking in San Felasco Hammock Preserve
State Park, my favorite park in the whole world. Walked a total of 8.9 miles,
and my legs feel it!
The main goal was to get a gps track on the last mile or
so of Blues Creek. The creek does not show up on aerial photos due to its small
size and density of the forest cover, and I want to assemble a map of such park
features. As I pulled into the Millhopper Road trailhead, I spied my long-time
friend Bob S and a group of birders coming out of the woods. Turns out Bob was
finishing an Audubon trip that he led. After the rest of his group left, he, Mike,
and I headed south to find a bluejack oak (Quercus
incana) because Mike had never seen one. After searching in vain for one,
we headed back to the trailhead and they drove off, and I struck out on my
official mission to the north.
It took a little less than an hour to reach the end of my
last recorded track of Blues Creek, and I followed it from there to where it drains
into the earth at Little Otter and Big Otter Sinks. The hike beside Blues Creek
does not have a trail, not even a wildlife trail alongside it, so it was a bit
of a bushwhack. Fortunately, briars and spider webs were rare, and mosquitoes absent.
That latter is odd considering that water levels are up out there and all the
perched sinkhole ponds contained a foot or more of standing water. But I will
not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Along the way to Blues Creek, I was able to add another
30 sinkholes to my gps collection of San Felasco’s sinks, which now totals
almost 350 in number. I hope that putting all the park’s sinks on a map will
enable me to tease out some of the karst hydrology of the park.
I spotted a fern of unsure identity along the way. I am fairly familiar with the ferns in this region, so a new one on
me is almost certainly a rare one around here. It keys out to the genus Polystichum. I didn’t think it was either
of the two species in that genus listed in Atlas of Florida Vascular Plants, but two knowledgeable fernatics, Alan and Jose, both tell me it is Christmas fern, P. acrostichoides. It doesn't look at all to me like the Christmas ferns in the mountains, which, contrary to these Florida ferns, are evergreen, bigger, darker green, longer-leaved, and more robust. Oh well, I have a lot to learn about ferns. Here are several pics of the plant: