I’m still in the process of making friends with my new camera, a Canon Powershot SX210 IS. It’s a slightly more compact camera than my previous point and shoot, offering 14 megapixels and a 14x optical zoom, and way more features than my trusty but aging Lumix has. The increased picture size really makes it apparent how slow my current memory card is.

Saturday was our first park outing since getting the new camera. I keep entering into options menus accidentally, and there’s no place for my right thumb. The flash position is unfortunate, but since I so rarely use flash, unintentionally holding it closed/off because there’s nowhere else to put your left hand works fine for me. I’m fairly pleased with its focusing choices and colors. Exposures have been a little bright sometimes, but it handles low light decently. Some of that may be settings I haven’t adjusted yet. It seems more aggressive with its denoising and sharpening.

There’s a butterfly garden behind the visitor’s center at Sawgrass. Having recently rained, there were not many butterflies out. We did get to see a long tailed skipper:

And what we think might be another spicebush swallowtail, with pretty badly torn wings. It hung around on these flowers for quite a while and I got several interesting shots, but the lighting was pretty contrasty for all.

I’ve heard repeated complaints (reported by the media) from people in the tourist industry claiming that the media has misrepresented the effects of the deepwater horizon disaster. That the media is driving away business because tourists think that every beach on the Gulf is black with oil and tar balls are everywhere you look. I, for one, have never heard the media say such a thing. Perhaps this is still what the tourists think, after all I’m a 15 minute drive away from the Gulf and have more incentive to track the oil’s progress, but there doesn’t need to be any oil on your beach right now to drive everyone away. I see little difference for a tourist planning a trip several months out, with any number of available destinations, whether a beach is black at the moment, or has a strong possibility having oil on it by the time their trip rolls around. I do not expect a casual tourist from a different part of the country/world to have a good grasp of sea currents or the geography of the gulf coast. Do not blame the media for posting pictures of oiled birds and coastlines. Blame BP for creating such a devastatingly newsworthy disaster.

It’s been rainy and green the last few days, but a few weeks ago we got a great sunset from Lake Seminole Park.

In our backyard. Mike took the bunny picture.

I was at first giving the benefit of the doubt. The scales of pressure and depth seriously complicate plugging the blown out Deepwater Horizon well. This is not your garden hose springing a leak, and I do not expect the fix to be kindergarten simple as so many armchair idiots have been professing (balloons! hair! Hooters girls’ pantyhose!). However, as this drags on through each failure and more details of short sighted greed and disregard for safety surface, I’ve lost any sense of goodwill. Sure, they’re now capturing some of the oil, but how much is still being spilled? The numbers keep changing. Oh, it’s pumping out a mere 1,000 barrels per day, no, maybe it’s more like 5,000, well, since we’re now collecting 10,000 barrels, it must be closer to 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day. For over a month, outside scientists have been delivering much higher estimates, which have been rebuffed by the government before relenting with small increases in the official flow rate. The latest estimate from the government is 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day, although this is based on information gathered before cutting the riser pipe. BP has lost all credibility in being able to or even interested in determining the scope of this disaster, let alone showing they are capable of ending it.

And while I do not expect the government to have vast oil drilling expertise generally (except in the MMS. complete fail. How in the hell is Ken Salazar still in charge of anything?) it has towed the corporate line, letting BP flail around while the Gulf and shoreline become coated in ever increasing fields of poison. Obama, here was your opportunity to take disaster and bring the best minds and expertise together to shut down the well, contain the oil, and tackle the clean up. Mobilize America. Do more than talk about ass kicking and making BP pay out on claims. Get an accurate assessment of the problem and then react accordingly. Convey competence because you actually know what’s going on and what to do to fix it, instead of coming across passive, shirking responsibility by trying to talk down the probable impact of the catastrophe. No more of this display of ratcheting up political pressure. We need more than press conferences. The EPA’s own contingency plan authorizes the National Response Team’s On-Scene Coordinator “to direct all federal, state, or private response and recovery actions.” BP shouldn’t be running anything. Fucking own the disaster response.

Mike wonders about the possibility that BP is intentionally failing to cap the well because it means losing the future revenue stream from the well once it is permanently sealed. Somehow it falls a little flat to learn that the BP’s share of oil revenue from the Deepwater Horizon well will be “donated” to help wildlife. BP is responsible for the cleanup costs. You can’t call providing some method of meeting your obligations donating out of the goodness of your non-existent heart. The excellent Rolling Stone article on the spill clearly shows that BP doesn’t even put the pretense of good corporate citizenry.

“Since 2007, according to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, BP has received 760 citations for “egregious and willful” safety violations – those “committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health.” The rest of the oil industry combined has received a total of one.”

“In 2005, 15 workers were killed and 170 injured after a tower filled with gasoline exploded at a BP refinery in Texas. Investigators found that the company had flouted its own safety procedures and illegally shut off a warning system before the blast. An internal cost-benefit analysis conducted by BP – explicitly based on the children’s tale The Three Little Pigs – revealed that the oil giant had considered making buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: “If the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled.” But the company determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead pigs.”

Fines obviously do not matter. We keep throwing spare change penalties for destroying human and environmental life and wellbeing. A $75 million cap on liabilities from the spill? BP posted a profit of $6.08 billion for the first quarter of 2010. 75 million is 1.2 % of their play money, from just 3 months. What fairy tale is the Gulf? So far it seems to be the one where BP gets to write their own happy ending.

Lake Wales Ridge runs in a narrow strip north to south down the center of Florida, roughly centered over Polk County. The slightly higher elevation relative to to the rest of Florida kept these rolling hills dry when much of the rest of Florida was under water, allowing for a unique, isolated ecosystems to evolve.

As with most of Florida, the soil is pure sand. Without the Gulf nearby, it gets hotter than along the coast. We aimed to arrive shortly after dawn, and watched the sun rise about the the time we got into orange grove country.

Although I’m finding mention of it now, I did not have warning beforehand of the honor system fee to enter the Walk in the Water State Forest. That wasn’t really a problem (I try to always bring some ones with me) except that the collection pipe was at a completely separate trail head a mile or two to the north. Not terribly convenient.

A recent fire had burned down the vegetation near the trailhead.

It had rained the night before, leaving the sand clean to read the fresh footprints. There were many deer hoof prints, some probable raccoon prints, and then we saw bambi out ahead on the trail.

Spicebush swallowtail, we surmise. And then we got tired of the horse flies and turned around.

Hickory Lake Park was more desert like.

Hallictid bee on scrub morning glory

Scrub lizards

By the time we stopped at Crooked Lake Park, it was getting quite warm, although it was only around 11 am.

In a field of flowering prickly pear