Mike in the Wild

I thought I knew a thing or two about barracudas.  After all, I've encountered several in Maui and Cozumel, even writing in detail about them over a year ago.  Slow, shadowy, lurking, uninterested in humans, intimidating in appearance, was how I mostly described the usually harmless, large fish.  After my latest visit to a reef off of Cozumel a brand new word entered my lexicon when describing the predator: terrorizing.  Due to strong winds, I got a late start snorkeling on my single day in Cozumel, heeding red flag warnings all morning on the Mexican island's coral reef-fringed western coast.  But at Punta Sur Ecological Park, at the extreme southern end of Cozumel, the weather and surf were postcard perfect.  It didn't take long once I arrived for me to don my fins and mask and head into the inviting and azure Caribbean Sea.  A buoy marked where a reef that's part of a separate protected park begins several hundred meters from the beach.  It's a lengthy swim even

With stops that included Cozumel, Roatan, and Belize, my cruise to the Western Caribbean was mostly dedicated to discovering its marine life.  Lugging my fins, mask, and snorkel, along with an underwater camera, I was prepared to spend most of my port stops swimming and snapping shots of fish that call the vast Mesoamerican Reef connecting these destinations home.  Of course, I also schlepped along my 400mm zoom lens and DSLR camera because birding was also at least a small part of my week-long plan.  You don't need to even disembark a cruise ship to witness the many sea and shore birds that live off of the ocean's bounty.  Gulls are the the most common and will surely escort your ship as it sets sails from any Florida port.  And don't miss the ospreys that ply the surrounding harbor for underwater prey.   As you make your way into tropical waters, frigatebirds and boobies are the most likely birds you'll encounter while at sea.   Wind prevented me from getting an early

I looked up in the sky and saw a bright, white silhouette, gleaming far away in the late afternoon sunlight.  My first thought was of a balloon, perhaps of the Sino spy variety.  However what were the odds another one would float over the United States so soon and so brazenly?  And the shape was all wrong, pointed and oblong.  Still it lumbered slowly, steadily like a glider, mechanically looping over a small area to the south of my Biltmore community.   Of course I soon recognized it as a bird.   My zoom lens conveniently handy, I snapped a couple of shots to definitively identify it.  Red-tailed hawks frequently soar overhead, riding the thermals in wide arcs as they focus on prey hundreds of feet below on the local golf course.  White egrets and great blue herons occasionally traverse the neighborhood skies on their peregrinations along the local canal and between several manmade lakes.  However this bird was none of those: instead an osprey, another common bird in Phoenix, but an u