Ike and the Limpkin

My wife and I tend to name animals we see a lot around the complex where we live. There are too many to list at the moment, but all these animals are wild but reside around where we live.

There is a family of Florida Sandhill Cranes. We first met the "husband" and "wife" over a year ago and after seeing them often, we named them "Ike and Audrey." Recently, the couple had a baby that we named, "Bailey." Bailey was sooo cute and was this little hunk of fluff with long legs. He is probably six weeks old now.

Ike is very protective of Bailey and is constantly on watch. They are used to me, so they do not pay me much mind. But if you are a threat, you better watch out for Ike!

The other day, I saw a Limpkin, which is a large wading bird with wonderful designs in its feathers. It has a long neck, long legs and loves to eat snails. The Limpkin was right beside a thicket by the stream. I headed over there with my camera.

I caught some nice shots of the Limpkin and then noticed Ike come steaming over even though the Limpkin would never eat Bailey, especially since Bailey is now almost the same size as the Limpkin! Besides, Ike's family was over 200 yards away at the time!

Between me and Ike, the Limpkin was not going to hang around to see what happened and went into the thicket below the shore level and hid in the heavy brush. I wanted to see if I could get a few more shots of it and gingerly worked my way into the brush. I found the Limpkin and managed a few shots and decided I had enough of mosquitoes buzzing my head and branches sticking into me and backed out.

When I turned around, Ike was standing there, staring at me. He was no more than three feet away and it was SO comical. He was looking at me like, "Did you get it?" or "Did you chase it off?" I laughed and said that it's still in there and it wasn't going to be chased off. That wasn't good enough for Ike and he just kept bobbing his head at me.

Finally, he must have sensed that it was all okay because he joined his family and they took off across one of the lawns. What follows is an image of the Limpkin before it went into the brush and of a butterfly that was also in the thick brush once I got in there.