Lake Morton - City wildlife

The baby goose that is being raised by the black swan mom is growing up.

Baby goose standing in the middle of her adoptive parents.

She's looking at me like "Where's the bread?"

I found this great blue heron fluffing up from the wind.

Cute turtle staring at me from a rock.

I stopped by Lake Morton in downtown Lakeland on my way home from a recent trip to Gatorland to see how much the baby goose had grown up. Somehow, a  pair of black swans took over parenting a baby goose at the lake. The swans were still staying close to the baby even though now it was almost as big as the swans. They followed each other around the lake. They were a strange family.  It looked like most of the white pelicans and migrating ducks were gone from the lake. Only the resident geese, swans and ibis were present. I still didn't see any baby swans but several swans were sitting on nests.

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A strange family - Mama swan and baby goose

I'm not quite sure of the story behind this family.  At Lake Morton there's an adult black swan who is taking care of a baby goose. The swan follows the baby around and stays really close. She treats it as if it were her own baby. I don't know if the geese parents abandoned the baby or somehow eggs got mixed up. There's a lot of both swans and geese at the lake. I had seen a picture of the baby on a fellow flickr's stream  Mike's picture and thought I'd stop by the lake and see if I could find it. Sure enough, wandering around the crowd of people feeding the wildlife was the baby goose and mom swan. They made a cute family.