Critters!
When we visit, well, anywhere, we are on the look out for animals. Lynn has excellent animal radar, but I've also gotten pretty good at finding our furry or feathered friends. We keep a list of the animal sightings that we have and hopefully are able to get a decent photo of the critters (often the photo, regardless of how bad it may be, is needed to make an identification once we get home from the trip). There are several galleries of wildlife photos on my SmugMug page as well as a few videos. I've detailed the more interesting sightings in the trip reports and journals and also kept track of the animal encounters on the Chippewa Inlet Trail. But occasionally we'll see something cool in the backyard or just driving around, so I added a page for just miscellaneous critter sightings.
This is a list of the animals that we have sighted during our trips (not every sighting for each critter is listed if, but at least the first sighting; we have seem multiple examples of several critters in a lot of locations). We see wildlife just about everyday in our backyard or at the bird feeders. We did not get photos of all of these, but we did have the good fortune to see them in their natural habitats.
Mammals:
Even-toed Hoofed Animals (Artiodactyla):
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Birds: The list of birds is getting long. To make the list more manageable, I've tried to divide the list by order and family of birds, as best as I could (dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not an ornithologist!) and later added some additional subdivisions (order, etc.). I used "A Guide to Filed Identification: Birds of North American" for the groupings. In February 2013 I found a link to eBirds.com as part of the Great Backyard Bird Count, so I started trying to log my bird sightings through that site (more data for the scientists and a way to help track what all Lynn and I have seen).
Current (4/20/2024) "life list" stands at 429 species (including "races") of birds .
Loons:
Grebes:
Tubenoses: Birds of the sea; they have external tubular nostrils.
Pelicans and Their Allies:
Shearwaters:
Waterfowl:
Vultures, Hawks and Falcons:
Gallinaceous Birds: Heavy bodied, chicken-like land birds.
Herons and Allies:
Cranes and Allies:
Shorebirds, Gulls and Alcids:
Parrots:
Pigeons and Doves:
Cuckoos, Roadrunners and Anis:
Owls:
Goatsucker: Nocturnal insect eaters with large, flat heads, small bills, enormous mouths and distinctive white patches on their wings or tails.
Swifts and Hummingbirds:
Swifts: Like Goatsuckers, Swifts feed almost exclusively on insects caught on the wing. Swifts fly continuously all day except in heavy rain.
Trogans:
Kingfishers and other Coraciiformes:
Woodpeckers and other Piciformes:
Perching Birds (Passeriformes):
Flycatchers, Phoebes and Kingbirds:
Larks:
Swallows:
Jays and Crows:
Jays:
Chickadees and Titmice:
Verdins:
Bulbuls:
Dippers:
Nuthatches:
Creepers:
Wrens:
Mockingbirds and Thrashers:
Thrushes, Solitaires and Bluebirds:
Thrushes:
Wagtails and Pipits:
Waxwings:
Silky Flycatchers:
Shrikes:
Starlings and Mynas:
Vireos:
Warblers:
Old World Sparrows:
Blackbirds and Orioles:
Tanagers:
Grosbeaks, Finches and Sparrows:
Estrildid Finch:
Manakins (Pipridae):
Woodcreepers (Dendrocolaptidae):
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Reptiles:
American Alligator - Florida; Orlando, FL (January 2020) American Crocodile - New River, Belize (April 2010) Lizards:
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Fish:
Reef fish - Belize barrier reef; there were many other fish that we saw that went unidentified (April 2010):
Trout:
Random Sightings:
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Amphibians:
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Insects: There are lots of bugs, some more interesting than others. I'm not going to try and list every insect we see but I'll at least note the more interesting looking ones.
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Spiders:
Other Miscellaneous Critters:
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