Palms on Pine Island

We took a field trip today to Pine Island, one of the barrier islands to the north west of Fort Myers. This view is of a fishing pier at the north end of the island, which is also home to lots of palm plantations and an historic site of Indian mounds built by the Calusa Indians, a people that disappeared from the area sometime in the 1700s. It was really hot, so we didn't take the interpretive trail but it would be a good project for a winter visit here.

A close up of the Royal Palms, right, shows just how majestic and huge they can be. On some parts of the island we saw huge downed trees, leftover damage from Hurricane Charley, but this area looked good.














Doug took a picture of me and Norm, left, in this historic preserve.

This was one of many palm plantations on Pine Island. These are Royal Palms. Nearby we saw a tall nesting platform, and over Pine Island Sound we saw two large dark birds with white heads circling...perhaps they were among the 10 or so eagles known to be nesting on Pine Island this year? We enjoyed the area because it had a real mix of uses and didn't seem as manicured and packaged as some of the tourist areas.

Updated note: I apologize for the strange gaps between pictures and copy on this post. I have studied the HTML code and I think by hitting the Return key too many times I inserted some code I don't need. But I'm too chicken to try deleting it; I'm afraid I'll lose the whole post. Live and learn.