The Great Florida Birding Trail is a program of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and is comprised of a 2000-mile highway trail which unifies more than 400 existing and new birding sites throughout Florida. I travelled a small section of this route in an effort to view some of Florida's finest birding areas. Florida truly is a bird photographer's paradise due to the enormous numbers which overwinter there and the ease in which they can be approached. This is the first trip I have taken where I mainly concentrated on shooting wildlife (with the exception of a few sunset landscapes) as too many shots are missed otherwise. The notable locations along the birding trail I visited included:

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (near Cape Canaveral)
The St. Augustine Alligator Farm
Gatorland in Kissimmee
Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge (Sanibel Island)
The beaches and piers of Sanibel Island
The Little Estero Lagoon on Fort Myers beach
The Venice rookery
Fort De Soto Park near St. Petersburg

This little adventure spanned the period of Feb. 11-20, 2006. While this was too early to view chicks (with the exception of great blue heron chicks at the Venice rookery), we did get a chance to witness great egret courtship behavior at both the Alligator Farm and Gatorland.

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