One by one, about a hundred gulls appeared in the sky from the east, circling the paint-chipped dinghy that bobbed like a homemade fishing lure about 100 yards off the Clearwater Beach coast. Making worse noise than an English new wave band, the man duct-taped to the mast couldn’t get away from the mad cacophony […]
First Sam brushed the driftwood gently to remove sand and dirt. Then he softly blew on the wood from all angles to alert whatever unseen organisms might live on or in the wood, giving the tiniest specks of life a chance to move out or fly away. Then he soaked the driftwood in a pail […]
Just like that, out of nowhere, Sam Bennett delivered to a stranger on the beach an impromptu ornithology lesson. “A gull can eat up to 20 percent of its body weight in food each day,” the shriveled sun-cured senior citizen said. “That’s a lot of french fries,” Marty Durkin said. “A group of gulls is […]
Every man, woman and child in the civic arena rose to their feet when little Sally Rumple took the podium. Dressed in a camouflage patterned sun dress, the freckled second grader wore blond pigtails and a sunny smile. “I can shoot the eyes out of a potato,” she said into the microphone in a Minnie […]
Whatever it took to save the world, Ruby Arenas worked all the shifts she could get as a server at RayRay’s Elbow Room to earn money for her master’s degree in environmental science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. RayRay promised to hire the 25-year-old nature lover fulltime as soon as he had […]
