4 February 2018 Return to Estero

We visited Estero on our first Florida visit. We had a great time and were eager to return. We had tried to visit earlier in the vacation, but the park was closed for a controlled burn. Today it was open and we were ready to tackle the trails under the blue skies.

We stopped first to try avenging an unfound multi from our first visit. Someone other than the cache owner had performed maintenance. We found the first stage today, by the second stage was a projection with what appeared to be wrong information. Oh well...

On our last visit here, there was a fair amount of water and many, many fiddler crabs for enjoyment. Today, and earlier visit in the year brought us dry trails and almost no fiddler crabs. We managed to spot one lonely crab in a moister area.

Birding was relatively quiet, but we managed to spot a pair of killdeer.

We had new areas of the park to explore with the waters down. Estero is one place where we have seen a wild boar. There is plenty of evidence they still have a strong presence in the park.

In this area of the park there were many pig wallows visible...

and a lot of hoof prints.

Happily for us, the only ones we saw on this trip were at a long distance.

We found and logged a rare for us earthcache. The cache was about ancient sea fossils in an area of the park including sea coral fossils. It showed us a park feature we hadn't seen so it was fun.

Sea Coral Fossil

We have been to Florida enough times to see evidence of the state trying to control the invasive melaleuca tree. We've seen removal efforts in a couple of locations, but this was the most extensive.

Wood storks and floatplanes ruled the local sky.

We took a walk tp the river on the sugar sand for a last cache in the main section of the park.

We made our way to the other side of the bay and our last walk of the vacation at the Winkler Point Trailhead. We were hoping to make a find on a 2003 cache, but we missed the container. Maybe we can spot it on a return visit. Winkler Point supposedly has two seasons wet or buggy. We were certainly not here in the wet season and seemed to have missed the bugs too. Our journey was almost people free this evening.

More effort to remove melaleuca trees

Mounds of Melaeuca

Dry and Empty

The sun sets on vacation.