Down by the Riverside

I might have mentioned that we are currently residing on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. (Hey, if it was good enough for Thomas A. Edison, it's good enough for us.) Looking down from the 13th floor, I noticed several floating objects on top of the water and thought they were leaves..........no....they're not floating........they're swimming. Are they turtles? Not even close.....we were being invaded by a fever (correct term) of stingrays. Yikes! Who even imagined that stingrays inhabited fresh waters? I accidentally sat on one in the Gulf a number of years ago, but both of us emerged from the encounter, shaken but unscathed. However, that event occurred long before Steve Irwin's catastrophe, and before that huge ray collided with and killed a woman on a boat a few weeks ago. They may be deadly, but they are amazingly graceful moving through the water. I'm not sure what brought them to the surface today, but we ran down to the sea wall for a closer look at them. Alas. The little devils were not so easy to see in the murky water at ground level. The photo is from our window.

However, we were able to observe several schools of large fish rushing past on a journey to nowhere in particular and back again. Twas a bit of rush-hour traffic on the river. Actually, the fish were reminiscent of great flocks of birds flying south. You know, those ones that swoop across the sky in undulating waves. Well, these travelers were flying through the water like a gigantic team of synchronised swimmers, and pity the poor stingray who gets in their way.