animals of the georgia/northern florida coast

by Max

Hi, this is Max. I was going to do a post just about the animals of Jekyll Island, Georgia, but we went to a bunch of different places, so this is about the animals we've seen on the Georgia and northern Florida coast. [Editor's note:  we made liberal use of the Intertubes to identify many of these. We're not experts, you know.]

On Jekyll Island, we saw a big nest on top of a dead tree in the swamp. The birds on top were ospreys, which are like sea eagles that eat fish.

We saw several different lizards. We don't have lizards in Indiana, so these were cool to see. The first was a six-lined racerunner, which we saw on Amelia Island.

Here is a broad-headed skink, which we saw near the golf course on Jekyll. I almost ran it over with my bike!

There was another lizard at the sea turtle center, but we don't know what it was.

We also saw sea turtles there. This one was called David Buoy, which Mom and Dad thought was funny. He's under the water here.

On Amelia Island, we saw a snowy egret.

We found this giant beetle in our cottage. It was like 2 inches long! We're not sure, but we think it might have been a triceratops beetle.

There were many different kinds of crabs. This one was on the driftwood at Driftwood Beach on Jekyll.

We also found lots of hermit crabs. They were all over the place in the water at Glory Beach on Jekyll.

There were lots of cardinals. We have these in Indiana, but they were still cool to see here.

There were lots of mockingbirds, but we couldn't get a good picture of one. Here is one at the putt-putt golf course. It is hard to see. It had a nest in a palm tree in the middle of the course!

There were a ton of deer on Jekyll Island. Some of them were eating every night in the neighbor's back yard.

This is a great egret. It was on the south end of Jekyll Island.

Finally, there was this raccoon that kept coming up to the back door of our cottage. We think that maybe other guests had fed him, and he was looking for food. Dad threw rocks at him and scared him away. Then last night, we saw a raccoon (we don't know if it was the same one) on the side of the road near our cottage. This picture didn't turn out very well.