The wild things
of ordinary places

1. 01

   Church grounds

   A lawn edge and a curb strip. Home to a resident Muscovy flock that has clearly decided this is their parish too.

   Muscovy duck · golden hour · approximate

2. 02

   Land O' Lakes Recreation Complex

   A roadside pond with reeds along the far bank. Herons work the shallows; turtles haul out on the bare ground near the path.

   28.1993, −82.4322 · heron, softshell turtle

3. 03

   The yard

   The smallest site in the guide and the most visited. Squirrels in the grass, and frogfruit in bloom with something feeding on it.

   Location withheld · squirrel, wasp, frogfruit

4. 04

   Tampa Riverwalk

   Where the city meets the water. Mangroves and marsh grass hold the bank while a construction crane stands on the skyline behind them.

   27.9447, −82.4588 · sunset · open 24 hours

5. 05

   The fountain pond

   A stormwater pond on a walking route — engineered drainage that quietly became habitat. Palms, a fountain, and an egret that keeps its distance.

   Approximate · great egret · evening

6. 06

   A neighborhood pond

   A retention pond with a sand shore and a swim buoy, ringed by cypress. A family of sandhill cranes walks the waterline most mornings.

   Hillsborough County · not mapped · sandhill crane

Seen at · A neighborhood pond

Sandhill crane

Antigone canadensis

How to know it

Gray, about four feet tall, with a bare red patch on the forehead and a shaggy bustle of drooping feathers over the rump. Cranes walk in groups across open ground; herons and egrets stand alone in the water. In flight a crane holds its neck straight out, a heron folds it into an S.

Worth knowing

They mate for life and stay together for decades. Florida has its own non-migratory subspecies that never leaves, joined each winter by thousands more from as far north as Canada. Cranes are among the oldest bird lineages still alive — fossils millions of years old are recognizably the same animal.

→ Protected in Florida. Feeding them is illegal, because fed cranes lose their caution and start walking into traffic.

Show on the desk

Seen at · Church grounds

Muscovy duck

Cairina moschata

How to know it

The red, bumpy skin around the face. Nothing else in Florida has it. Those growths are called caruncles, and males carry more of them than females.

Worth knowing

It isn't native. Muscovies are from Mexico and South America, escaped from farms generations ago, and Florida now holds an enormous feral population. They are the only duck ever domesticated outside Eurasia — and their ducklings have claws, which they use to climb tree trunks.

Show on the desk

Same species · White morph

Muscovy duck, white

Cairina moschata — domestic form

Why it looks different

Same bird as above. Centuries of farm breeding produced all-white and patchy-pied birds, and both now mix freely in feral flocks. The red face is the constant.

Worth knowing

A wild Muscovy is nearly black with a green sheen. Every white one you see is carrying the history of a farmyard.

Show on the desk

Seen at · The yard

Eastern gray squirrel

Sciurus carolinensis

How to know it

Gray-brown coat with a pale belly and a tail nearly as long as its body. In Florida it overlaps with the fox squirrel, which is much larger and often has a black face.

Worth knowing

They scatter-hoard thousands of nuts a year and recover most by memory and smell. The ones they fail to recover become trees. They also perform fake burials — the whole digging-and-covering routine with nothing in their mouth — when they think they're being watched.

Show on the desk

Seen at · Land O' Lakes Recreation Complex

Heron, and a turtle

Ardea sp. · Apalone ferox (probable)

The bird

Standing still in the reeds at the far bank — the posture of a heron hunting: motionless, neck folded, waiting.

The turtle

Flat and smooth-shelled rather than domed and ridged, which points to a Florida softshell rather than a slider. Softshells bury themselves in pond bottoms and breathe through a snorkel-shaped nose.

Worth knowing

If it is a softshell, do not pick it up. They have a long, fast neck and a serious bite.

→ Both IDs need a closer photo to confirm. Uncertainty is part of a field guide; it just has to be labelled.

Show on the desk

Seen at · The yard

Solitary wasp, on frogfruit

Vespoidea sp. · on Phyla nodiflora

The plant

Frogfruit: a low, sprawling native groundcover with tiny pink-white flower heads. One of the best pollinator plants in Florida, and most people mow it as a weed.

Worth knowing

A lawn left slightly alone grows its own pollinator garden. This one did.

→ Species-level ID needs a sharper frame. Genus is a guess from body shape.

Show on the desk

Photograph pending

Seen at · The fountain pond

Great egret

Ardea alba

How to know it

All white, tall, with a yellow bill and black legs. The snowy egret is smaller with a black bill and startling yellow feet; the white ibis has a curved orange bill.

Worth knowing

Great egrets were hunted nearly to extinction for their breeding plumes, worth more than gold by weight in the hat trade. The campaign to stop it created the modern Audubon Society — the bird is still its emblem.

Show on the desk

Almost nobody reading this will ever dive a reef. The aquarium is where most of us actually meet the ocean — which makes it an ordinary place too.

Reef tank

Sand tiger shark

Carcharias taurus — probable

How to know it

Ragged teeth visible even with the mouth closed, a pointed snout, and two dorsal fins of nearly equal size set well back on the body. The gape looks alarming. The animal is not.

Worth knowing

Sand tigers are the only shark known to gulp air at the surface and hold it in the stomach as a buoyancy float — it lets them hang motionless in the water instead of swimming constantly. They are docile toward divers, which is exactly why almost every large aquarium has one.

→ ID from body shape and dentition through glass. Nurse and lemon sharks are the other candidates.

Reef tank

The school, and a turtle

Caranx sp. · Chelonia mydas (probable)

What's happening

Hundreds of jacks moving as one body, with a sea turtle parked in the middle of them, entirely unbothered. The fish flow around it like water around a stone.

Worth knowing

A school like this has no leader. Each fish is only tracking its handful of nearest neighbours — matching speed, holding distance — and the shape of the whole thing emerges from those small local rules. Nobody is steering.

→ Turtle is most likely a green sea turtle. Jacks are hard to pin to species at this distance.

Reef tank

The whole tank at once

Carangidae · Carcharhinidae · Haemulidae

What you're seeing

Step back far enough and the tank stops being a collection of animals and starts being a map. Big fish patrol the open middle water. A shark works the right-hand wall. And everything small is packed down low against the rock, barely leaving it.

Worth knowing

That layering is not decoration, it's arithmetic. On a reef, open water is where you get eaten and structure is where you don't, so a small fish only ever strays as far from cover as it can sprint back. Ecologists use that distance as a live readout of how dangerous a reef is — where predators are thick, the schools press flat against the rock. You can read the risk in the room without ever seeing the hunt.

→ Wide shot through curved glass. The jacks, grunts and the shark are all genus-level guesses at best.

Jelly gallery

White-spotted jelly

Phyllorhiza punctata — probable

How to know it

A firm, domed bell covered in pale spots, with clubbed oral arms underneath instead of long trailing tentacles. It pulses steadily rather than drifting.

Worth knowing

This jelly farms. It carries symbiotic algae inside its own tissue and gets a large share of its energy from sunlight — which is why it spends its time near the surface. It's half animal, half solar panel. Its sting is mild enough that most people never notice it.

→ Lagoon jellies (Mastigias papua) look nearly identical in a tank. Called as probable.

Cold water exhibit

Anemone, under UV

Actiniaria

What you're seeing

The colour is not a lighting gel. Under ultraviolet light the animal's own tissue fluoresces — proteins in the anemone absorb UV and re-emit it as visible blue and green.

Worth knowing

Those fluorescent proteins turned out to be one of the most useful discoveries in modern biology. Extracted, cloned, and spliced into other organisms, they let scientists literally watch genes switch on — a cell that lights up is a cell doing the thing you're testing for. The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to that work. It started in a jellyfish.

→ Species not determined. Anemone identification usually needs the column and foot, which are hidden here.

Cold water exhibit

The crowded rock

Actiniaria · Asteroidea

What you're seeing

Not one animal but a whole wall of them — a tall smooth orange column on the left, a cluster of frilled pink anemones across the middle, sea stars folded over the rock at the top right. Every square inch of that surface is spoken for.

Worth knowing

Anemones that look like a peaceful carpet are usually at war. Many species reproduce by simply splitting in half, so a patch of them is often a single animal copied hundreds of times. Where two different clones meet, they fight — with tentacles built for nothing but combat — and the fighting leaves a narrow bare strip of rock between them that neither side can hold. Those empty seams are borders.

→ Species not called. The violet lamp shifts every colour in the frame, so nothing here can be identified by colour — only by shape.

Touch pool

Anemones and sea stars

Actiniaria · Asteroidea

What you're seeing

A tide-pool exhibit shot under coloured light — the same fluorescence trick as the frame above, spread across a whole community.

Worth knowing

A sea star eating a mussel turns its stomach inside out through its mouth, wraps it around the prey, and digests the animal externally before pulling the stomach back in. Many species can also regrow an entire body from a single surviving arm.

Wetlands exhibit

American alligator, juvenile

Alligator mississippiensis

How to know it

Broad rounded snout, and with the mouth shut you see only the upper teeth — a crocodile's fourth tooth sticks out over the lip. The pale banding across the tail fades as the animal ages.

Worth knowing

Alligator sex isn't set by chromosomes. It's set by the temperature of the nest during a narrow window of incubation — cooler produces females, hotter produces males, and a few degrees decides it. Which means a warming climate is quietly doing something to the ratio.

→ This one is behind glass, but the species is genuinely an ordinary-places animal in Florida. Retention ponds, golf courses, drainage canals. Assume any fresh water here has one.

Shallows tank

Large silver fish

Unidentified

What can be said

Big plate-like scales, an upturned mouth, a blunt head, and a body built for holding position rather than chasing. It sat just under the surface the whole time.

Worth knowing

If it's a tarpon, it can breathe air — tarpon gulp at the surface and absorb oxygen through a modified swim bladder, which lets them survive in water too stagnant for almost anything else. It's why they thrive in Florida's back bays and canals.

→ Not called. Tarpon is the best guess from the scales and jaw, but the angle hides the dorsal fin. If there was a placard on the tank, that settles it.