On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
frosty
I had two goals for this day trip. First, to add another National Park to the ones we’ve seen, and second, to hopefully see some birds that aren’t found anywhere else in North America. Both goals were successful!
Dry Tortugas is 70 miles into the Gulf from Key West. There’s two ways to get to the park: by seaplane or by ferry. We took the ferry, 2 3/4 hours each way. It consists of seven small islands, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but it was a significant enough crossroads for the US to build one of its largest coastal forts here between 1846 and 1875. Fort Jefferson was never finished and never attacked, but it was used as a prison. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, served time here.
This is our ferry docked at Dry Tortugas. Garden Key in the foreground, Bush Key curving to the right, Long Key in the distance.
The interior of Fort Jefferson
Exterior. The fort was built with a moat surrounding it, partly for defense, and partly as a breakwater against waves.
Ramparts and cannon
Moat and very blue Gulf waters
Magnificent Frigatebirds. Everywhere else in the country when you look up and see black birds circling, they’re Turkey Vultures. Not here!
Magnificent Frigatebird (female, identifiable from the white breast)
Sooty Terns, one of the rare ones I wanted to see. There were hundreds of them, nesting on Bush Key. The ranger told me they arrived the night before we got there. This was as close as I could get, they close Bush Key to visitors when the terns are here.
Brown Noddy Terns , the other rarity. They live at sea and only come to dry land here to nest and raise one chick a year. They usually don’t arrive this early in February. I held off our trip to Dry Tortugas until the last day we were in Key West and I got lucky. According to eBird, I was the first to see them this year; there weren’t any earlier reports.
Brown Noddies. This isn’t a great picture with a 200mm lens, unfortunately.
Winter Wren
My wife and I planned a first trip to Dry Tortugas that we had to postpone when the pandemic started. We have rescheduled our tickets yearly now for various reasons, most recently from this coming Tuesday to next April (once we actually went to embark, but they warned that seas were very rough and offered rain checks for that trip which we took). Your photos whet my appetite for going next April! Glad you were able to see your target species – I hope to see those also and perhaps some early spring migrants when we go.
There go two miscreants
Ft. Jefferson looks to be pretty hurricane-proof.
Gotta enjoy those National Parks before they’re sold off to the highest briber!
Ol_Froth
The gun looks like a 15″ smooth bore Rodman. Some of these served as active coastal guns up until WWI after being re-sleeved with steel inserts, converting them to 8″ rifles. You can see some of the re-sleeved ones at Ft. McHenry in Baltimore.
Jerry
I love Fort Jefferson and would visit again in a heartbeat if I could.
Mustang Bobby
Living as I do in Miami, I’ve been to the Keys countless times, but never the Dry Tortugas, Now I want to go. Thank you, Frosty.
way2blue
For me—hailing from the west coast—this seems quite exotic. I assume this was a day trip—so a long afternoon boat ride back to the mainland—hoping the wind didn’t come up… Very cool regardless.