Juvenile Night Heron

This juvenile Night Heron on Leffis Key was so mellow he didn't even mind me sticking my camera right up in his beak.

Lichen of Leffis Key

There are several different kinds of lichen thriving on trees in Leffis Key, to the extent that it starts looking kinda Day of the Triffids.

Lichens, commonly thought of as being plants, are actually complicated composite organisms consisting of a fungus and a photosynthetic partner - usually algae or bacteria.

Leffis Key

Yet another installment in my neverending assay of Flo-zone's 4,500 islands (a statistic you can probably quintuple if you include islands less than 10 acres in size)... the amazing Leffis Key.

Leffis Key is completely unpopulated and, aside from a few wooden walkways built to enable you to walk over the thick mangrove swamp that makes up most of its surface, shows no signs of civilization whatsoever. It's located just off the bottom southeast coast of Anna Maria Island, just before the bridge that carries you over to Longboat Key.

The attentive reader may also have noted already that the cover image for my book The Seventeenth Island was taken from the edge of Leffis Key, with that other I-have-no-idea-what-it-is-because-no-map-seems-to-say island in the distance.