Sugar Sand

A nearby park has two nature trails we love to walk. One trail is named after the Sand Pine and the other the Slash Pine, although I confess I find the differences in these two pine trees difficult to determine. Today we took the Sand Pine trail with a habitat know as Florida scrub. A distinctive feature is the sugar sand that you can see in a picture my wife took of me looking at the burrow of a Gopher Tortoise. Chapman oak grows along with the pines and palmettos. We also found this mushroom I think might be a Tawny Milkcap. Walking through the scrub on a well-layed path of wood chips offers a pleasant look at Florida's past, a past that goes back to the Pleistocene era of 10,000 years ago when mammoths and giant sloth's roamed the earth, and people hunted for them. Today the nature trail leads to Little League baseball fields, and days in paradise.