Yes, Eventually, there will be Dinosaurs

Who doesn’t love Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Malcolm in the original Jurassic Park?

He was a meme machine when the Internet was still a baby.

One of my favorite lines from the movie comes when they are all in the jeeps, getting the basic Jurassic Park tour, only all of the dinosaurs seem to be hiding.

Dr. Malcolm turns to the camera in the jeep and says oh so dryly, “Ah, now eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs, on your, on your dinosaur tour, right?”

I was beginning to feel like Dr. Malcolm lately while touring a local wildlife sanctuary, one that was well known for the Florida Scrub Jay, a threatened species of bird, and the only bird endemic to Florida.

And yet, just yesterday afternoon when I went, not only were there no scrub jays, there were no birds period.

This morning, I thought I would give it one more try.  I’ll come right at sunrise, I thought.  It’s cold.  It’s clear.  If I’m going to see any birds, it will be then.

I tried not to be disappointed as soon as I stepped on the bridge that begins the trail.  I was listening for birds.  Lately, I have found it easier to locate birds by sound than sight.  But out on the bridge this morning, all I heard were cars, barreling down the road during rush hour.

So, I decided to do something different.

I left the trail—not in a Little Red Riding Hood, ill-advised detour kind of way.

I left the walking trail and decided to follow a car path that I had taken some months before, hoping that I would find at least some birds, sitting high in one of the old pines.

The sounds of the road began to fade, the further I walked from the street.

And I began hearing more bird song.

I had no idea what a scrub jay sounded like, but again, at this point, I was just hoping to see any birds.

Suddenly two small birds, mockingbird-sized, burst out from the trees some fifty feet away, one settling on the branches of the old pine.

I raised my camera and started taking pictures.  I was too far away to see what I was taking a picture of.  I was just hoping that whatever I caught would be in focus.  I could pull it up later on the computer.

It’s sort of like fishing, feeling a tug on the line, and then having someone blindfold you while you pull the fish out, unhook it and release it back, never knowing what you might have caught.

I thought at worst, I was taking pictures of a mockingbird.

And that was fine.

But it wasn’t until I got home and pulled that picture up that I was amazed to see the telltale faded blue coloring of the Florida Scrub Jay.

It wasn’t the best picture.  The sun was right behind it, but now I know, yes there are scrub jays in this scrub jay sanctuary, as promised, and like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, they are beautiful and rare and special, though, fortunately, much less likely to swallow me whole.