Cedar Key

Back home after nine days' concentrated labor at Cedar Key, the quaint resort town about sixty miles from here.   I finished the novel I was working on, Work Done for Hire, and started the next, tentatively called Phobos Means Fear.  That's the title on the contract, anyhow.

When I wasn't working, I spent a lot of time out on the dock, watching the fish and birds do their thing.  Pretty cold, but otherwise pleasant.

I saw a remarkable altercation between a bald eagle and an osprey, about a third of its size.  The osprey, a fish hawk with a wingspan of about a yard, is a lot more nimble.  It was harassing the eagle relentlessly, which I assume meant that the eagle had discovered its nest, and had designs on the osprey's chicks or eggs.

They fought all over the sky – left, right, up, down – crashing together several times.   Then the eagle executed a move that looked like it was straight out of a WWI Flying Ace manual.  He stalled mid-flight and started to drop like a rock.  The osprey hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then stabbed down like a spear . . . and missed death by inches when the eagle suddenly uncoiled, flying on its back with huge talons grasping!   Only fifteen or twenty feet above my head, they flew away screaming and cawing, out of sight over the road that separates the salt marsh from the Gulf of Mexico.

Otherwise, the animal behavior on display was pretty quiet, birds stalking or waiting patiently.   Fish, especially mullets, jumping high out of the water.  (Mullets seem to jump for the hell of it, not escaping predators.  I've read that they do it to force parasites out of their gills or something.)

I've probably said this before . . . I'm reluctant to write anything about Cedar Key, because I don't want people to learn of the existence of such a lovely quiet retreat.  It's like a sleepy New England town transplanted to a subtropical beach.  It can support a few hundred tourists at a time, but if twice as many showed up, it would be the beginning of the end.

Joe