MERRITT ISLAND NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE -- I had been in the refuge just a few minutes when I spotted a red-shouldered hawk atop a power pole. Moments later, I saw two more. Then an osprey took flight over the marshes, with NASA's gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building providing an unlikely backdrop in the distance.

As I turned onto Black Point Wildlife Drive, a 7-mile-long barrier island road that is a haven for birds, I spotted a juvenile bald eagle perched in a dead tree, then soaring over the road and sweeping marshland.

That was all before lunch.

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, 24,000 acres on the largest undeveloped barrier island in Florida, is the perfect refuge from the outside world.

Here, I could turn off radio news, look toward the skies and attempt to remember what the world was like before Sept. 11, 2001.

It's tough to dwell on anything other than nature while watching dozens of great blue herons and snowy egrets poking around in brown, grassy marshlands, following families of mottled ducks gracefully gliding on still waters and witnessing a reddish egret practicing a shadow dance in shallow waters.

Before I drove to the Space Coast, I chatted with Wes Biggs of Florida Nature Tours, who is so crazy about birds that he recently drove 560 miles to see a rare lesser sandplover. When he isn't working as an environmental consultant, Biggs leads birding tours in the refuge, the Everglades, Dry Tortugas and other parts of Florida.

He told me I picked a good time to visit the refuge and its neighbor, Canaveral National Seashore, which stretches 24 miles along the coast across Volusia and Brevard counties.

Northern birds fly through the refuge in the fall on their way south for the winter. A dozen species of ducks live in the refuge in the winter. He said to look for mottled ducks, wood ducks, black-bellied whistling ducks, blue-winged teals, Northern shovelers, Northern pintails and lesser scaups -- among others.

Scrub-Jays Spotted At Seashore

He advised me to be extra sure to look for Florida scrub-jays, deep-blue birds that live only in Florida. The refuge and seashore are two of the best places to see them. And one of the best places to spot them is right next to the seashore's southern toll booth, just off State Road 3.

He was right. I pulled in, parked by the toll booth and studied the pygmy oaks and palmettos where he said they hid.

I actually started clapping when I spotted my first one after hearing its raspy "sheeee sheeee sheeee" that Biggs had mimicked for me.

After seeing a second and third, I ran back to my car to get my binoculars to watch them more closely. I watched one slurp a worm from the ground and another pop a berry into its mouth.

Biggs had said the jays were friendly, almost tame, and that they liked people. I thought of that when one came sweeping through the air so close to my head I had to duck.

He also recommended Black Point Wildlife Drive, a hard-packed gravel road in the refuge that wends past dikes, ponds, grassy marshes, open waters and scrubby red cedar trees. That's where I met up with another birder, Bob Paty, a wildlife photographer from Titusville who has sold photos of birds in the refuge to magazines and newspapers.

He's the one who told me that it was a juvenile bald eagle I had spotted on the drive and not an osprey, which I thought it was.

"I could see his silhouette. Right away I noticed he had white feathers on his chest," he said. "I've seen two adult bald eagles in the last two weeks. Eagles are what started me on photography. I've taken thousands of pictures of them since."

Loop Provides Lots Of Bird Sightings

I followed his van slowly around the loop, where we stopped along the way so he could identify some of the birds for me. In the hour or so it takes to go around the loop, we spotted great blue herons, snowy egrets, white ibises, little blue herons, night herons, a reddish egret, black skimmers, kingfishers, coots, mottled ducks and a lone alligator.

Two snowy egrets soared together in a graceful dance. Four more posed regally in the marshes. Mullet flopped out of the brown water, spooked by a great blue heron swooping low over the marshes.

Free booklets at the entrance describe the wildlife and habitats at 12 stops, designated by numbered markers.

I felt like Black Point loop was bird heaven, but Paty got out of his van apologizing: "Kinda boring day! I like to look for the unusual -- roseate spoonbills and bald eagles. This has been dull."

I was just thinking that the refuge has more birds than the Tampa Bay area has cars and how wonderful that seemed.

Egret Does Dance For Food

At Marker 11, we stopped to watch a reddish egret, which I had thought was a little blue heron, smaller kin of a great blue heron.

"See how he dances to create a shadow in the water?" Paty asked. "That shadow makes fish feel safe, so they'll head to the shadow and he grabs them. It's the only bird I've seen that does that dance."

The reddish egret also is distinctive for the reddish cast of its plumage and the pink at the base of its bill.

At Marker 12, Paty told me about a family of red-bellied woodpeckers he once saw peeking out of a hole in the dead cabbage palm. Another time, he saw a baby screech owl poking its head out of another hole in the same palm.

"I've seen bobcat out here, too," he said. "And there's a story going around that a Florida panther lives in the refuge. There have been three sightings, two of them by wildlife biologists. I'd like to get a photo of it. That photo would be in every newspaper in Florida, since most people think their territory is farther down south in the Everglades."

Later, about 6 p.m., I drove back around the Black Point loop and spotted a baby gator walking across the road, then slipping into thick palmettos. Only one other car was on the loop, a silver Porcshe whose driver was shooting snowy egrets with a telephoto lens. The whole time I was in the refuge, in fact, I saw few other cars, most of them from out of state.

Bird Lists At Visitor Center

Paty and Biggs tell birders to be sure to stop by the refuge's visitor center, just east of the Black Point loop, to get free bird checklists and to see displays, paintings and photographs of birds, bobcats and other wildlife in the park. In a logbook at the front desk, visitors note the wildlife they spotted in the refuge.

Entries read: "Saw Blue-winged Teals at Marker 6 on Black Point Wildlife Drive"; "Spotted Florida Scrub-Jays on State Road 3"; "Saw three manatee at the observation tower at Haulover Canal."

After reading that, I headed to the observation tower over the canal between the Indian River Lagoon and Mosquito Lagoon. I was about to leave when a man yelled out, "Two manatee!" A dozen of us watched as the manatees, one large and one smaller, floated in the canal in front of the observation deck.

We were snapping pictures when the larger one lifted its head up out of the water as a kayaker glided by. He hadn't seen it and innocently paddled right past, but then smiled widely when he spotted the mammoth.

When naturalist William Bartram lived in this area in the 1770s, he explored Mosquito Lagoon by canoe and claimed to have seen "11 bears in one day and many deer."

Deer are still spotted here, along with marsh rabbits, gray foxes, skunks, gopher tortoises, Eastern Indigo snakes, brown and white pelicans and hundreds of other kinds of birds, all in the shadows of two space shuttle launch pads.

As Biggs told me and I learned, the refuge "is the primo place for birds." And for solace.