These perfect days are becoming sweetly monotonous.  Overnight lows in the 50s, daytime highs in the low 80s, cloudless sky, light morning winds mounting to a good sea breeze by late afternoon, windows all open wide.

Startled a very big Indigo snake on the path down to the beach, or rather, he startled me. He was sunning in the open and shot into the palmettos when I approached, but I got a good look before he disappeared.  A magnificent snake, the Eastern Indigo, with a smooth skin that gleams blue-black in sunlight.  This one was a good six feet, but they get bigger. The largest on record was nine feet.  I’ve never seen one east of the highway, though riparian scrub is one of their prime habitats.  Have seen them many times around the house and in the hammock out back.  I guess this means there is a good supply of dune mice this year.  There is local consensus that one species of this little rodent is, in fact extinct, as well as a tiny dune wren, but I’ve seen them both.  Maybe they only exist in the environs of the little hacienda.  The mice are a favorite food of Indigos, but they’ll eat pretty much anything, even other snakes.  And they sometimes share a burrow with a gopher tortoise, which I think is very cool.  The Indigo is one of our favorite co-habitors, and we are always pleased to see a healthy population.

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Black-bellied Plover

This is a Black-bellied Plover, another of our favorite shore birds.  A roundish, plump little rascal you wish you could hold in your hands just once, quail-sized, about 10 inches, they are larger than the other species of plover found here, and get their name from the black feathering of their bellies during mating season.  They winter all down the Atlantic coast, but summer in the arctic, where they breed.  That won’t be for a while yet, so we get to have them around until they think it’s time to go.  The short beak precludes them from going too deep in the sand for food, so their diet consists mainly of sand worms and the smaller surface sand fleas.  A mostly solitary bird here, you rarely see more than one at a time, unlike the sand pipers and sanderlings, which sometimes flock.

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Best of all, The Skinny Island Post received its shipment of incense today; Sandalwood, Nag Champa, Frankincense, and Patchouli.  We are set for a while now.  Life is very good.

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