For a change of pace, and a break from the house renovation, I took a drive around it today. It didn’t seem much different than the last time I did it, over a decade ago. It’s an interesting lake, in that it has very few views of it from the road; you have to drive up toward it, park and climb the dike. One of the few (and best) is from the bridge at Canal Point. It’s not that big, but it’s big enough that you can’t see the shore over the horizon, so it’s kind of weird to look at an endless lake that’s not one of the Great Lakes.
[Monday-afternoon update]
The north side of the lake has a lot of cattle ranching. It was kind of funny to see a herd of cattle sharing the pasture with egrets. The white birds would follow the cattle around as they grazed. I wonder if there’s some symbiotic relationship there?
I am a long time lurker on your site. I see you will be speaking at the Mars Society Convention. I look forward to meeting you.
Lotta gators in that lake.
Fish, too, judging by all the camps and bait shops.
Popular for bass fishing.
The birds and cattle are definitely a thing. You see that all over. At least in the SE.
Cattle attract insects. Cattle egrets eat insects and small rodents. You can see them around Houston too.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Cattle_egret
They’re all over north Texas, too. They’re non-native to the New World. I don’t buy the theory that they flew across the Atlantic in the 19th Century. Why did at least one breeding pair only then make it over and not in any of the many preceding millennia? They hitched a ride on a cattle ship.
But the lake had to have changed in the past decade; you know “Climate Change”!
Pretty severe drought in Florida in the early 1980s. Went on for a few years. Okeechobee started shrinking due to lack of water. While large, the lake is shallow. All the expected doom and gloom voices started blaming mankind for the change. This went on for months. Late one summer, a tropical depression formed up, started crossing the state and stalled over the center of the state. It rained. A. Lot. Within a week, the lake was refilled to flooding as were the Everglades and the tropical depression moved on. Cheers –