The lady at the visitor center wanted to know if we wanted to see song birds or shore birds. John said that he did not care how certain the birds were. He was fine with shore birds or unshore birds. He doesn’t think the lady understood the joke.

She told us that the Chan West Pine Beach Trail has song birds and Gator Lake Trail has nesting Great Blue Herons and Great Horned Owls. She thought that the hike would be too long to do both together, and she warned us that the Gator Lake Trail is hiking on dunes (i.e., hard). Based on this, we planned to 1. park and hike Chan West Pine Beach Trail, 2. park and hike the Gator Lake Trail, and 3. park and hike the beach to the south.

The parking area for Chan West was gravel and well shaded. As normal, it had some informational signs in the parking area.

Hiking down to the Gator Lake Trail intersection was largely uneventful with a few sightings of common song birds and many calls from unseen birds. These are an Eastern Bluebird and a Northern Mockingbird.

A sign along the way informed us that this is a Monarch Butterfly migratory stop, and we did see a few Monarchs.

At the edge of the Little Lagoon and Gator Lake is a watch tower. Okay, think a little less Lord of the Rings and a little more State Park. It is not an orc watch tower; it is more of an animal watching tower.

The view from the tower across the lagoon, trail, and lake is quite nice. This is a 225 degree panorama from the top of the stairs (north) on the far left and down the shore of Gator Lake (southeast) on the far right.

And a 180 degree panorama, so it is a little less distorted.

Gator Lake is normally freshwater, but due to tides and storms, it can be brackish or even salt water.

Moving along the trail between the lagoon and the lake is where things started to get more interesting. The view into the lagoon is fantastic. (Click here to see the panorama where you can zoom in and see the Gulf Shores high rises. You will need to go back to this page.)

And this is where more animals started to appear, or scurry, or slither. When we got to the junction with Gator Lake Trail, we decided to just go for it. Hiking the dunes did wear us out faster, so we did not hike all the way to the other parking lot.

On the Gator Lake Trail, Kate immediately spotted a snake.

We could not get any good pictures of the snake’s head, but it might be a juvenile Florida Pine Snake. It was only about 18 inches long.

Next, we saw an Osprey nest. The lady at the visitor center mentioned a Great Horned Owl, and we are not sure if this was the nest. (No, they do not look anything similar, but sometimes Great Horned Owls steal nests from other birds.) John did not get any good pictures; the Osprey head was always a little blurry.

We found three nests that might be for Great Blue Heron, but there were no herons in the nests. The lady at the visitor center wondered how the herons felt about an owl nesting with them, so maybe one of the three was an owl nest. She also thought there were five nests, but we only saw three. We went a little further to see if we missed anything, and we found nothing else.

Turning back, we ran across a Six-lined Racerunner.

Back at the bridge near the viewing tower, we saw a fish floating down river. At first we thought it was hurt, but it poked its head up and sucked food from the top of the water. We are not sure what type of fish, but the fins seem to point upwards.

About halfway back on Chan West trail, we saw a small flock of Cedar Waxwings. They flew away before we could get a good closeup photo, but this is the most Cedar Waxwings we have seen together at once. Maybe they are early migrators?

John made the necessary pit stop along the way back to the car to eat lunch and cool off.