St. Augustine Alligator Farm - Florida

Map letter: B 

St. Augustine, Florida...

A quick run-down of my St. Augustine visit. I initially wrote a summary soon after I got home, but it has been lost to the interwebs, so now I will try to remember everything.

The skinny:

My location of choice was the St. Augustine Alligator farm. These Alligator farms are tourist attractions, where they stuff 500 gators into a tiny area, consider it a “breeding area” and add a bunch of touristy junk (other exotic animals, signs, displays etc) and charge you an arm and a leg to get inside.

The highlight for nature photographers is the attraction factor for wild (yes, wild) birds. They arrive at the gator-centre in full force to breed! Breeding above the gators is prime protection from land-based nest predators. The nesters are herons, egrets, ibis, storks etc.

Prime time seems to be in April and March to maximise your photography success, and I arrived in late February. Being quite far north in Florida, this meant that a handful of Great Egrets and Wood Storks had begun the nesting process, but very little else.

I worked away at the Wood Storks (which had been a life bird for me), and was happy to get some breeding behaviours captured, but decided to spend only a single afternoon before continuing on my journey.

Some images from the St. Augustine gator farm: