Florida Part 2: In which I go to the Alligator Farm.

St. Augustine is a fascinating town with a long history. And it's got the Alligator Farm. I'd visited the farm once before when I was pretty young, so I wanted to go again and see if it was as cool as I remembered. Indeed it was! However, it doesn't just have gators: the place is a menagerie of tropical wildlife, particularly birds, reptiles, and primates. So I'm breaking my pictures up into installments: first the reptiles, then the birds and primates.There's LOTS of these fellows lurking around the place. This particular gator is about six feet long and lives in the Rookery, a pond area with trees in which various stork-type birds nest. All the gators in the water reminded me of the old game Pitfall...More little gators, two and three footers.The farm has two albino alligators. This is the larger one, about four feet long. It wasn't very active and my little brother was a bit disappointed by that: "I thought it would be more exciting!" I explained that all an albino alligator has to do is sit there and BE ALBINO. Which it did.There were other lizardy type critters, too. This is, I think, an anole. I took scores of shots of this little bugger, trying to catch him with his red throat puffed out.A Galapagos tortoise, of the sort that Darwin found when traipsing about the world in the Beagle. I know this, of course, because I read National Geographic magazine. The tortoise looks depressed, but then they usually do.

Now for a lesson: how to tell the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. This is an alligator, about ten feet long.
And this is a salt water crocodile named Maximo, about fifteen feet long. Can you tell the difference? Just look close and it'll come to you.
Yes, it's obvious when you study the pictures for a while. Alligators only listen to Zydeco music, while crocodiles are fans of Euro synth pop. Easy, huh?