Port Canaveral Field Day

I recently had the opportunity to go down to Port Canaveral for some field work and boy was it fun to be out of the cubicle!! I felt like a fugitive who had just escaped a horrible prison, as if I had to keep looking over my shoulder to make sure my bosses weren't running after me with unfinished reports and expenses.

The pictures from the day turned out ok, but don't really capture the full feeling of it. It was overcast, but in my mind, any day in the field is just beautiful.

Part of the project was to field verify some seagrass mapping. This is a thick area of Shoal Grass (Halodule wrightii). Also present in significant amounts but in slightly deeper areas was Star Grass (Halophila engelmannii). Here's a great website for seagrass ID.

This area, known as the Banana River, has lots of bird rookeries and we saw everything from pelicans, osprey, terns, and more.These pelicans felt the need to guard the property. They just wanted us to know we were on their turf, fair enough.

And this dolphin has obviously been fed by fisherman over the years. He actually came up alongside the boat and begged for food by doing tricks and then look up at us!

We were threatened by thunderstorms all afternoon, but never saw any lightning, so we just kept plugging along with work and got a good long day of field work in.