Manatees....

Spent a few days at Blue Springs State Park, the winter home to more than 200 West Indian Manatees. Florida is the only place in temperate North America where these mammals, also known as sea cows, are found. An average adult is 10 feet long and weighs about 1,000 pounds.

Orange grower Louis Thursby purchased the land in 1856 and built a 3 story house in 1872. Thursby’s Blue Spring Landing was a busy steamboat stop, shipping tourists and goods to Jacksonville and beyond until the railroad came through in 1880. Mrs. Thursby was the first Post Mistress of Orange City.

The house is open for self-guided tours but only the kitchen has furnishings. The upper levels are closed to the public and the main level rooms are filled with informative placards and some artifacts in glass cases.

Blue Springs is a first magnitude artesian spring, discharging 104 million gallons of water daily into the St. Johns River. When the ocean waters cool in the winter, the manatees migrate up the St. Johns and into Blue Spring Run where the water temperature is a constant 74 degrees.

At the boil (the head of the spring) there are low levels of oxygen and food material. But within a few hundred feet of the boil the algae that covers the bottom supplies oxygen and vegetable food, so a variety of fish thrive.

In 1971 “The Forgotten Mermaids” episode of the Underwater World of Jacque Cousteau was filmed here and brought attention to the manatee and the importance of Blue Spring. 

Gar Fish

Up for air

Dark area is the spring head

Viewing platform, one of a few

Cow with 2 calves