Feeding time

White Alligator - also saw babies!

Finally getting a chance to post some more pics. I made it to the Alligator Farm and local Aquarium when my friend (Chris) visited. While I struggle with the idea of any of the critters living in captivity, this place (and the local aquarium) do take rescues and I believe both are involved in conservation.

Roseate Spoonbill

The Alligator farm has a ton of, well, of course ... alligators! But also all sorta of reptiles and birds. Giant tortoise (Galapagos), turtles, birds and snakes and a Komodo Dragon. The Aquarium was small, but to me that meant not a ton of animals crowded together. One big (I think they said 80 million gallon) tank with fish, a couple smaller tanks (one with a few sea horses) and one had the cutest little baby puffer fish (one word or two??). There was a hands-on tank for kids where they could touch a horseshoe cra

b. There were also a couple tanks with rays and nurse sharks and a grouper (the rays were separated from the others). 

Galapagos Tortoise trying to pick up something

Komodo Dragon

Both locations had ziplines - if one was so inclined they could zip over a bunch of alligators. That is not for me! Here are some pictures from the alligator farm. Like I posted previously, this site doesn't offer a lot of flexibility in the placement of the pictures so right now I am typing extra just to provide some text to wrap around the pictures. The first set are from the alligator farm. It is about 20 minutes from where I live and it was easy to spend a couple of hours wandering around. The enclosures didn't look cramped and other than not loving seeing lemurs in cages, for the most part the animals appeared content. It was cool to see so many different varieties of alligators and there were quite a few babies. The white ones were awesome. There were also scheduled feeding times and that came with a bit of a lecture so that was fun and interesting to watch. 

There is a rookery which was just amazing. Very natural landscape with TONS of alligators. All felt very safe (unless one would be stupid and jump below the boardwalk to get face-to-face with the alligators!). There were the typical "petting zoo" style gumball machines with food in them - looked like dog kibble and visitors could toss food to the alligators. 

The birds in the rookery when we went were few, or in hiding. I have heard it is amazing in the spring during baby season and the boardwalk will be filled with photographers. I cannot wait to go again just for that. 

Still trying to get this to look a little pleasing to the eye, but it isn't easy so a little more text. I couldn't resist taking a picture of the typical lizard here. Kinda funny when seeing him next to the big alligators, but he was happily sunning himself on the post.

Cassowary

Many of the birds pictured here were from Africa, but there were some others not shown here and I may try to add more later. I saw a toucan among other birds and they had some parrots, but some were in positions that were too hard to photograph through the enclosure without getting either tons of reflection or seeing the mesh.

I will make a separate entry for the pictures from the aquarium - just in case people didn't want to see alligator pictures. I have heard that not everyone likes looking at them. Actually, unless they were moving, they all looked fake!