by Katherine

          Florida is a glorious place for wildlife. Though I do not share my mother's obsession with birds, I can  agree that the birds of Florida are pretty awesome and unlike anything you see in much of the US.

          You see the American White Ibis, egrets, herons, and pelicans all over the place. My best sightings were from the car so I didn't have time to get a picture. I saw a Sandhill Crane, which is an extremely tall bird. I thought for a second I had seen an ostrich or an emu; this bird was the height of an 8 year old child. On the same car ride, I also saw an armadillo. It was on its side so I thought it might have been dead, but at the zoo I discovered they sleep that way, so it possible this one was just taking a snooze. And when we were getting a tour of the Cape, we spotted a wild boar along the side of the road. I had no idea those lived in the area, and from our angle it looked almost like a small rhino. Unfortunately no alligators (though I would want to see one of those from a car only) and no manatees, but I have seen those back when I lived in Florida for two summers long, long ago.

by Katherine

          As were on our way back to the airport in Cancun, I saw a creature walking about on the grass on the side of the road.  I got excited at the sighting of another wild animal. I turned to Brad and told him it looked almost like a baby lion. He only caught a brief look at it and said it must have been another coati. We had seen several coatis, members of the raccoon family with pointy snouts, on our way to Tulum. As I had looked through pictures of resorts before booking, it seemed like coatis were the mammal one was most likely to see. When I saw this creature at the airport, I was pretty sure it wasn't a coati, as Brad had insisted, but I hadn't gotten a close enough view of the coatis to rule them out.