While development in Miami goes ahead full speed, plants and creatures remain bountiful. Marsha Colbert, above, came to our StoryBooth to talk about her love of people and nature. She is a biologist and informed facilitators Jonah Engle and Nadja Middleton about some of the vegetation they have been impressed by since arriving from New York. Besides palm trees, Miami is home to a variety of trees such as Australian Pines, red-berry producing Brazilian Peppers, Royal Poincianas from Madagascar, Yellow tabebuias and Mango trees from India. With a colleague and orinthologist, Marsha was kind to help identify these birds:
Mostly there are boat-tailed grackles, a species where the males are black and the females are brown. There are also European Starlings, a smaller black bird that has white speckled plumage at some times of the year. -Miami’s flora and fauna are apparently as cosmopolitan as its inhabitants! In her email Marsha wrote: “These birds may have been gathering to sing at the end of the day before going to roost for the night. Possibly they were flocking or gathering together in the open, such as on power lines, and then going to sleep in the canopy of nearby trees.”
Below, a favorite picture taken at sunset near Miami, in the Everglades national park.
February 8th, 2010 at 3:07 am
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