Greetings, Hivians. This is my entry for this week's #WednesdayWalk challenge created by 
We walked around the area today and I am also going to include some pictures from a couple weeks ago when we were here to contrast what it looked like before and after Hurricane Ian. All photos were taken by me with my Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.
This is a beautiful sanctuary for birds and other wildlife such as gators, turtles, squirrels, and bats. There is a nice shelter with picnic tables which offers a great place to have a quiet, peaceful meal or to work on a brainstorming project which was our case the first time we came.
The Venice Audobon Society manages this place and has their building next the refuge. They have some work to do to clean up from Ian. The walk around the lake is a short walk but there is always something amazing to see and there are benches so you can sit and enjoy watching and photographing the birds. There were a lot of photographers here the first day we came.
There is an island in the middle of the lake that had maybe 40 egrets dancing and sunning on it the first time we came, but today it was empty and the trees lost much of their foliage.
The first picture here is what it looks like now, followed by what it looked like before the hurricane.
The lower trees make up the entire small island in the middle of the lake. You can see how the wind thinned out the trees there and the larger trees in the background.
On the west side of the pond there stood 6 bat houses which house multiple breeds. The most common being the Brazilian bat which can fly up to 50 miles away from the roost each night eating insects. They can also reach up to 10,000 feet in altitude. The pics below show the before and after the storm.
The storm knocked 4 of the 6 houses over and damaged the houses. Hopefully they weren't in there during the storm.
This next picture was taken today and you would probably think that this tree was damaged from the storm. This is exactly as it looked weeks ago and they even have informational signage explaining the importance of these dead trees to the birds that frequent the area.
You can see a woodland stork perched at the top and a little bit lower on the left is an anhinga. The anhinga is also known as the snakebird which is fitting because the first time I saw it I thought it was a snake. They hunt by wading through the water and they go in deeper than their bodies leaving their long necks sticking out of the water looking like a snake.
Across the road from the shelter was where much of the action was today. There is another lake over there and standing water in the drainage ditch. There were multiple Great Egrets and Snowy Egrets, a blue heron, two storks, a little blue heron, quite a few white ibis, a turtle, and a young alligator enjoying this water.
We were going to walk around the lake on this side of the road but were turned back by some of the wildlife shortly after we started. No, it wasn't a gator, it was a colony of fire ants. We each took a few bites, brushed them off quickly and walked back to the road. Floridians know to watch out for floating swarms of fire ants after storms. They band together and form floating masses and bridges as they relocate the queen and eggs to a new location because theirs was flooded out.
A nice gentleman from the Audobon club said that this one was several months old. From head to tail it is about 24 inches. He also mentioned they have much larger ones here too. We saw one swimming in the first lake the first time we were here. I tried to get a good photo but the distance and the fact they blend in with the water made that a difficult task with just a phone camera.
We continued our walk around the back side of the main lake. You can see the wind was coming from the opposite side so there is still a lot of green on these trees.
There were also a couple larger trees that were knocked over and uprooted.
I hope you enjoyed this Wednesday Walk around the Venice Rookery. If you are ever in the area and love birds and wildlife, I highly recommend stopping by here. The best times are going to be the hours after sunrise and before sunset.
Have a wonderful week and I'll leave you with one more photo of the baby gator. Cheers!!
