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First morning back in Butonwood Bay and I was awake at 6am.......as I expected would be the case.

Got up shortly afterwards and had coffee with Deb & Den and then Deb and I went into town for breakfast - a shared meal of pancakes, sausage, bacon and eggs for about $5.30 all in.

Can't beat that for a deal.

When we came back here, we went for a golf cart ride along both nature trails and due to the recent heavy rains, there were many more places for gators to be seen.

This little fella was about 5ft long but sadly for us, his head was in the reeds and so I only managed to get a photo of his bottom half.

Next time, pal, you're mine !

It seems there are plenty of gators inside the park this year and we saw 5 this morning. None were very close and apart from this one, the rest were in the water and so we only saw the tops of their heads.

A little bit further along the path we came upon this little bunny waabit who hopped onto the path and then sat still as if posing for me.

Not exactly exotic but cute none the less.

We also saw the dozens of pesky squirrels that will come up onto the golf cart given half a chance and they are so tame and are always on the lookout for food.  

We're told not to feed them but many do.  You know oldies.  Always wanting to break the rules !!

Then we came to the only bird on the water today.  There are usually plenty of them all over the park but maybe they're still off on their holidays or something but in any case, this was the only one we saw.

I know it looks like it's resting in the water but it was really fishing and was poised ready to strike.

You could wait for ages to capture the strike and to be honest, I'm not that into wildlife photos.

Now if I was on a commission from the National Geographic or BBC Bristol then I'd be happy to sit for hours waiting for the right moment.

But I wasn't so I didn't.

We saw loads of turtles but they were really too far away to become decent camera models. They were on the far bank of the channel that leads to the lake and with the amount of green algae in the water, they were hard to spot if they went in for a cooling dip.  

This one was on as branch and if you enlarge it, you'll see it was doing it's best to keep it's feet out of the water.

I'm not sure why it bothered as to get anywhere, it would have to go back in anyway. Or maybe it could waddle up along the branch.

So not bad for a 30 minute drive this morning and it promised much more to come over the months as a gator just has to come a bit closer sometime - not too close though.

A man's gotta know his limitations, as Clint used to say. And I certainly know mine.