Not your usual wildlife area

Last week found me back in Tampa for the 2018 Advanced Placement reading for English language: 1600 English teachers scoring around a million and a half essays--in eight days--in one room. Both the convention center and the hotels in which the readers were ensconced are on the Tampa Riverwalk, which is definitely not the downtown Tampa of the late seventies, when I was a student at USF and the city was in the midst of a wave of violent crimes. Today the Riverwalk is lined with high-rise hotels, office complexes, and expensive condos, with people still enjoying the view and the amenities most nights when I fell asleep, with other intrepid souls jogging even before sunrise. A lovely place, but not where one would expect particularly good wildlife-watching opportunities.

And yet, some of my fellow readers were blessed with porpoise and manatee sightings in the Hillsborough River, a shallow estuary that in my student days was seriously polluted but is returning to health, thanks to forward-thinking city governments and lots of citizen involvement. I did not get to see any aquatic mammals, but laughing gulls were the background track to every  walk, and my lunchtime view on the last day was of a pair of ospreys swooping about. Every evening at sunset, great blue herons glided overhead, returning to their nearby rookery, and a particular set of bridge supports became the roost for a diversity of area avians: not only the ubiquitous pelicans but white ibis, great egrets, and snowy egrets, along with several scruffy grayish birds with a wading-bird form, possibly some of the smaller herons.

Seeing places working on ways to coexist with wildlife makes me happy.