This morning, John Livernois and I traveled south to the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, located in northern Collier County,  arriving there about 8:30.  The primary purpose of this visit was to see and photograph the Ghost Orchid, a very rare orchid.  A single blossoming plant was discovered last year at Corkscrew.  This same plant blossomed again in the last week or two.

We were quite surprised to learn that the swamp has been dry, due to minimal rainfall the past year and early this year.  It was about a mile walk along the boardwalk to the location of the orchid.  Staffers had set up a spotting scope looking at the orchid, which was about 150 ft away.  Even with the scope pointing at the plant, it was still difficult to find.

We set up our cameras with 400 mm lenses on tripods.  We also used 1.4x teleconverters, making the effective focal length of our setups equal to 900 mm.  There were only several spots where one could get a clear unobstructed view of the orchid.  If you got too far to the right or left, a branch would obscure the view.  Lucky for us, there were very few people stopping by to view the orchid.  It was quite hot and muggy, causing one’s glasses to fog up when looking in the viewfinder.  After capturing a few images we started back.  There were no water birds to be seen, due to the lack of water.  We did spot one Red-shouldered Hawk sitting quite close to the boardwalk.  There were a number of small birds around, such as Grackles, Carolina Wrens, Mockingbirds, and Woodpeckers.  By the time we got back to the visitor’s center, we felt a few drops of rain.  Good timing.