Might as well start with something simple. Many shell fragments on the beach looked like this, with holes eaten by something or other.
	This is a great egret that just happened to be walking through the parking lot at our hotel.
	On Wednesday we took a tram tour of "Ding" Darling Wildlife Refuge. This is another not-so-great photo, but it's the best one we could get of roseate spoonbills. Interesting fact: their bills close reflexively when they detect prey, bypassing the brain entirely.
	There's a lot going on in this picture, from the same day. At the bottom left we have a couple of double-crested cormorants. The long-necked guys, including (I think) the flyers are great egrets. Along the top we have both brown and white pelicans, and then toward the right we have some white ibises. At full resolution this picture makes a really nice desktop background at work.
	This is a fairly large crab, about 4" across, that we found on the beach.
	These large shells - up to about 8" long - were everywhere on the beach, but this is the only one we saw that had any sort of meat on it.
	We only saw two crabs while we were there, and got pictures of both. Isn't he cute?
	This is only part of Cindy's collection; she was, shall we say, a little less picky than I was about what she brought back. The ones at the top are fighting conchs; we found a couple of live ones too, but dutifully returned them to the water. Below them on the left are some lightning whelks and then some fig shells, while on the right there's a pair of tulip shells.
	One of several alligators we saw during our independent stroll through the refuge on Thursday.
	A white ibis, from the same stroll.
	This picture is here to give some sense of how extensive the shell beds along the beach were.
	The dark-feathered guys are skimmers. They forage by flying along just above the surface of the water, dipping their lower bills - which are much longer than their upper bills - in the water. The guy with the orange bill on the right is a royal tern. There was a large mixed flock of royal terns, other terns, and gulls that generally hung around the section of the beach nearest our hotel.
	Sanderlings. These guys were fun to watch, running almost constantly to stay just ahead of the waves as they came in. Talk about fast food; they usually only got to probe the sand for a couple of seconds between one wave and the next.
	A great blue heron. It's not evident from the picture, but this fellow was missing his right foot.
	Willets. We saw a lot of these, but usually only one at a time. Seeing such a large group was a bit of a surprise.
	We actually watched this jellyfish (almost two feet across) wash up while we were taking "one last walk" on Sunday morning. Seeing something that looked so much like a giant booger served as a not-so-welcome reminder of the cold I'd caught a couple of days before.