Travels along Florida's "Forgotten Coast"

The Forgotten Coast of Florida, self-named, is the part of Florida where the west coast takes a sharp turn to form the Panhandle. It has the occasional small beach, with darker sand than the glittering white expanses of Clearwater Beach, Madeira Beach and Sarasota. It has extensive and very beautiful shallows that would be mud flats except that they are more sandy than muddy. The area has produced magnificent harvests of oysters, shrimp and sponges.

It is also home to wildlife both beautiful and deadly. There is a park called Tate’s Hell State Forest. The story is that a man went into the forest following his hunting dogs one day. As he got ever deeper into the forest following the baying of his hounds, the dogs were silenced one by one (a cougar, perhaps?) and the man became lost and fell into the swamp. He was bitten by a water moccasin, became feverish and wandered delirious in the forest for ten days. When he finally staggered out the other side, someone asked him his name. He said “My name is Tate and I have just come from Hell.”

From the safety of a balcony, however, the wildlife dazzles with its variety and beauty. Especially the birds, which are of course much more visible than other animals. There is a complex of rental units on a large, heavily wooded and landscaped piece of property on the wide wide Apalachicola River in Eastpoint, just east of the long bridge that takes you into Apalachicola. The place is called the Sportsman's Lodge. It is home to a large flock of very tame peacocks, peahens and little bitty peababies (I counted thirteen or fourteen over a two-hour period.) They sit on the tin roofs, wander up to the office door and bob up the stairs to the second-floor porch and rooms. The hens scratch endlessly around the rocks and low shrubs, teaching their babies how to forage. It appears they are also fed cracked corn by the lodge owners, so they do very well. They are joined by a pair of quite ugly adult Muscovy ducks, followed by two cheeping yellow-gold babies.

Viewed from the porch, the panorama of the river and shoreline provides the opportunity to rack up an impressive count of different types of birds. Ospreys, of course, abound, as do the ever-present blackbirds and some crows. Numerous pelicans glide and roost. In addition, however, are the loner birds. A kingfisher lands on a wire, dives a couple of times and disappears. What appears to be a young bald eagle circles twice and returns to the woods. A hummingbird feeds on a flowering vine in the tree. A white egret still-hunts in the shallows. A great blue heron also stands peering intently into four inches of water but chases away a second heron, even though he is surrounded by acres of unpopulated fishing grounds.

Might as well be at a wildlife sanctuary. There is also a resident squirrel that looks like its mother got friendly with a fox. It is the usual squirrel color, but the center strip of its tail is the color of a red fox. Bizarre.