Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive, FL 7/5/25

     For the July Fourth weekend I travelled to Orlando, FL with my wife and eldest daughter.  My daughter is a Disney World junkie, and we have travelled there the past few summers.  On Saturday, my wife and daughter started out early park-hopping.  They released me of any obligation to spend the day at the parks and allowed me to go do what I like to do - walk around looking for birds and other creatures.

I drove up to Lake Apopka to visit the wildlife drive there.  I have been there a few times, and it is a nice eight- or nine-mile drive through central Florida's natural habitat.  On a good day in the right season, one can leave there with an eBird list of 70 or more bird species.  I knew going in at mid-morning on a sweltering hot day that I wasn’t going to reach that number.  Since eBird recently began allowing inclusion of photos of other animals observed to your checklist, that has added a new adventure to my birding.  I have often added to my checklist notes any interesting other observations, but adding the photos makes it more adventurous.  I only checked off 28 bird species for the day.  Except for some mourning doves, all the birds were regular inhabitants of wetland habitats.  When I was inside the car, my windows were up and the air conditioning was on, so other birds were not really detected by sound.
One of several black-necked stilts seen along the drive.  © S. Weiss

There is some grassland, farmland and wooded areas along the drive, but it is mostly wetlands.  The drive is only open for vehicles on weekends and holidays, so there were many vehicles traversing the one-way roads on Saturday.  It appeared that most of the visitors were more interested in spotting and photographing alligators, not birds.  There were plenty of both animals to see.  Probably the most common bird in the park was common gallinule.  There were literally hundreds of them, young and old, all over the place.  I did not find any new life birds on the day, but a couple year ones.  The year newbies were black-bellied and fulvous whistling-ducks, purple gallinules, gray-headed swamphens, least bitterns and western cattle egrets.
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Left, a family of fulvous whistling-ducks.  Right, pair of gray-headed swamphens.  © S. Weiss

Left, purple gallinule fledgling.  Right, adult purple gallinule.  © S. Weiss


Left, juvenile western cattle egrets at the edge of a rookery.  Right, the most cooperative least bitterns, hunting out in the open.  © S. Weiss

Besides the many alligators creepily loafing in the waters along the roadside, there were other Florida fauna to see.  I picked out Florida softshell turtles and Florida red-bellied cooters, white peacock and gulf fritillary butterflies, and several dragonflies rare in New Jersey like four-spotted pennants.  I did see a new life species on the day.  I almost blew it off as a gulf fritillary as I was driving by, but after a second thought I pulled over and took some photos of it.  Lucky for me I did.  It turned out to be a queen butterfly.  The queen is similar looking to a monarch, even in the same genus, Danaus.  They are rare vagrants to New Jersey, so I likely won’t see one outside of Florida.
Two of the many alligators freely roaming the waters of Wildlife Drive.  © S. Weiss

Queen butterfly.  © S. Weiss

Lake Apopka Wildlife Dive, about an hour north of Disney, is a great place to find and see Florida wildlife.  Plus, it’s free.


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