In Search of Peacocks, Cat Trick

OK, it looks like a ditch with a couple rocks in it.  But those swirls are manatees floating just under the surface.  Fifty plus manatees ahve been holed up all week in a little canal by the town ball field. 

It has been cold - a week with temps in the thirties.  Manatees may look like they have plenty of blubber, but that's not fat, that's mostly air bladder for buoyancy.  When it's cold, manatees die. 

Townsfolk, snowbirds, news crews have been keeping watch all week, wondering why the heck they chose this ditch instead of deeper spots with more vegetation/food. 

Whatever the reason for the gathering, eventually someone figured out that the water had gone down in the Satellite Beach ditch since they entered.  The manatees were trapped and couldn't leave.

The very good city of Satellite Beach got a back hoe down there yesterday and dug out the canal.  All but a few are gone back out to the river, where hopefully it will be warm enough for them to stay.

If it gets that cold twice in one winter, I say it's time for us all to move further south!

  

Peacock Ride

One stop is about all we are good for when there's maybe 2 hours of daylight left and rain clouds closing in.  We choose the short and sweet Peacock Ride. 

At the north end of our little chunk of Tropical Trail, live a dozen or so peacocks.  They hang out in trees, front yards, and often stroll nonchalantly up and down the road. 

We scan the trees and the yards, and even though we do hear what we think is a peacock cry, we don't see any.  So back we go to Mather's Bridge....

  

....where we see birds of a different feather!  Dozens of pelicans are roosting on the support structure of the little swing bridge.  It's not the thriving numbers of twenty years ago, but it's more pelicans than I've seen in one spot in a long time, and it feels good to see it. 

Cat Trick

Home again before the squall.  But the squall outside is nothing compared to the brawl inside.   It's been 2 weeks and Gypsy is still not feeling the love.  A little research by Popeye provides us with a few tricks to make all 3 cats more comfortable with each other. 

He builds them a condo out of boxes, and he cleans the scary cat doors so they get the best possible visibility.  (You never know when a territorial Pepper is waiting on the other side to whap you.  It's enough to make a new girl want to pee in the house.) 

We feed them all at the same time in the same room to associate positive feelings with proximity to one another.

But the best thing we do is sprinkle baby powder over every spot of territory they fight over, the couch, the chairs, their new condo.  And then we sprinkle them too!  All three of them now smell the same.  And like magic, the spits and hisses lessen. 

Hat's off to Popeye!  It's a Cat Trick!  He shoots! - he scores! - in this crazy new game of herding 3 cats.

And finally, a few peaceful moments.