I ran into a baby boom over at John Prince Park on one of my paddling trips the other day. 

This large county park, real close to my house in Lantana, FL, has always been my year-round, go-to spot for birds, but it was only last spring, when Covid kept me pinned in Florida through the winter for the first time since I’d retired, that I realized it was also a pretty good nesting spot in April and May. 

Last spring I discovered a bunch of baby green heron hanging out around the dead-end lagoon over close to Congress Avenue and JFK hospital.  There aren’t any babies visible back there yet this year, but judging from the amount of adults I saw last week there should be a bumper crop of green heron young coming along soon.

But back to the babies that are there now.  On the boring, mundane side there was this family of Egyptian geese.   See more about these geese here.

More exciting to me were the large nests in the tall Australian pines lining the water south of the Sixth Avenue South bridge.  I had looked up there to watch the pelicans that usually roost precariously on the thin branches with their webbed feet.

Looking closer I realize there were blue heron adults on two of the nests and in one there was a baby or two.  This is the first time I’ve seen blue heron nesting in the park.   I’d seen blue heron scrounging for nesting material in the tiny patch of scrubby land next to my house several weeks ago but until now didn’t know where the nest building was happening. (Just click on any photo to scroll through the larger images)

Even more fun were the limpkin babies.  I’ve seen babies around in previous years, even in my backyard, but I was lucky enough to see a youngster being fed. Limpkins feed mainly on snails, which they find by pushing their beaks around into the bottom in shallow water. 

In this instance, the baby would wait on the shoreline while the adult went wading out to find food.  The adult brought the snail back to the shore, extracted the meat of the snail and gave it to the youngster.

I’d like to say I hid in the shallows in my canoe for days, subsisting on crackers and water and peeing in a jar, to get these photos, but the reality is that I was loading the canoe on the car, walked around to the back to get some rope and there they were, fifteen feet away.  Sitting limpkins so to speak.

Here’s a shot of an adult limpkin with a small snail (and a bit of weed stuck to it):

And here’s a couple photos of a baby limpkin. Coincidentally, baby limpkins go through the same frizzy phase my granddaughter Margeaux went through about ten years ago, so I’ve tossed in some photos of that.

In the gallery below are some up close and personal shots of adult and baby. This is what happened every time the adult returned to the shore with a snail. The baby kept an eagle eye on the adult’s beak as it extracted the meat of the snail and passed it off to the baby. The snail itself is down in the grass and not visible, but in a couple of the photos you can see the snail meat in the baby’s mouth. Click on any image and you can scroll through the larger versions of all of them.

And, finally, we saw a flasher in the park. I’ve been mooned by a blue heron before (photo included below) but this flashing was a first.

OOPS. I’ve forgotten to include some photos of the green heron over at the park who I hope are busy getting ready to have babies. Here they are:

But let’s continue the baby theme, in a different locale, I spotted a baby American oystercatcher a couple days ago with an adult on one of the islands along the eastern shore of the intercoastal south of the Lake Worth Bridge.  There were two babies, but they scattered to the weeds really fast and this was the only shot I got. Following is a gallery of some of the other shots of the day.

And finally, the house below on the western shoreline caught my eye.  I had seen one like it on my trip down the Mississippi River in 2003, north of Minneapolis. 

So I found that 2003 photo in my files.  Here it is, with the photo of the West Palm house. Very close design, different sizes.