In early October, on one of the first chilly mornings that warmed into a fantastic weekend, we returned to Alligator Lake Park. It was also our first adventure with my new lens hood. Useful accessory.

Neither of the photos in my bird books show the prominent yellow eye ring, but we believe this is a yellow-billed cuckoo. It was a very curious bird, like the mockingbirds, which means it was actually facing me instead of the usual bird butt poses I end up with in my pictures.

The coots were not present in huge numbers as we’ve seen on previous visits, but there were several pied-billed grebes.

Viceroys (below) and gulf fritillaries were the most prevalent butterflies that we saw.

Many pollinators were interested in these flowers. I believe they are beggar-ticks.

A checkered skipper.

There were many pondhawks warming up or flying about. This larger dragonfly, which hovered for a few moments over the path, seemed to be hunting some of them.

Mike took this picture of the same species, common green darner.

When we got back to the car, we found two mockingbirds fighting. There was a little blood, but both flew away just fine after their dispute was resolved.

In the latter part of September, right after a rain, we visited Weedon Island Preserve. Near the first trail entrance, we saw two osprey in a dead tree.

While I was taking pictures of the osprey, Mike noticed a little frog hidden in the weeds beside the road. I believe this was the first frog we’d seen at this park. Mike took a picture so we could try to identify it later. We started down the trail and almost immediately found another much larger frog. Mike took this picture as well, in between the fairly dense underbrush.

It turns out that this day, Weedon was overrun by these leopard frogs. Most of them we only noticed as they made huge leaps into the water beside the path. And we must have only noticed a fraction of the true number of frogs surrounding us.

We saw two of these immature yellow crowned night herons.

Bill, the brave mangrove tree crab, pausing on the boardwalk. Usually, these dart out of sight while we are quite far away, and even when you do see them, they usually are in very low light areas.

A green anole with blue dusted skin.