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| Everglades waterway |
11/9/10
Surrounded by the Everglades and perched on the edge of the South Florida Sea dotted with hummocks of mangrove islands morning arrives slow and measured. Barely after the stars of the Southern hemisphere have had time to fade away the pre dawn slowly slips under the window shades of our Airstream. As the sun breaks the eastern horizon blocked by a cypress tree line bird songs ease into your sleepy mind. Wake up you are in the Florida Everglades! Don’t waste this primeval beginning to a new world.
The avian calls become clearer over the distances like treble staccatos as the sun’s golden light tips the tree tops then slowly climb down the trunks. Soon the savannah is washed in early morning light. A light not harsh or glaring but smooth and enveloping. Its a feeling of good will. Soon other faint grumbling, barking, grunting, and cooing sounds flow from the swamps to our north. But mostly its quiet. Its an immense quiet like the earth had all the time in the world to awaken.
I of course jump up to peer out the door and exclaim “Good Morning gaitors !” - nothing....ah well. This feels like a morning for Earl Grey Tea, English style with lots of sugar and milk and hot enough to burn. A proper bracer for a proper morning, an Everglades morning.
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| Gaitor |
Today I took a guided flat bottom skiff through the shallow waters of the Everglades inland where bodies, bays, creeks and waterways intermingle in a massive profusion of wildness. The sky is a cloudless blue white. Narrow winding creeks and canals lined with impenetrable mangrove trees are tinted a fluid rust from tannic acids of decaying vegetation.
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| Tri colored heron |
All along the waterways graceful slender herons and egrets suddenly appear out of the tangle, fly along side the boat within arms reach then peel away to the tree tops or light upon a mangrove root. The colors of plumage breathtaking. There is an immediate sense of a density of life. Occasionally the crenelated back of juvenile alligators will slip among the roots or be seen basking on a muddy outcrop.
Then the tight and intimate waterway will suddenly fan open revealing an expanse of water and sky that stretches to the horizons. The lake is peppered with floating colonies of coot birds numbering in the hundreds spread about the silvery surface like quivering islands. On the far horizon, waters too shallow for our craft, the deep green shoreline glitters with thousands of snowy white egrets drifting to and fro like schools of tropical fish. The Everglades is truly a paradise for birders.
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| Sunning |
Crossing the open body of water we enter another narrow natural meandering stream again wrapped on both sides by dense deep vegetation, every bend different every bend a new heron, sitting, watching, fishing, oblivious to our presence, an imperious indifference. There is so much wildlife teeming here that we feel small and ignored but at the same time buoyed and privileged voyeurs to this panoply of
living ecology.
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| Bromelaid host |
At days end I hoof it back the two miles in the heat and straffing skeeters with a gouty left foot and a blistered right foot. But after seeing what
I have seen this afternoon I won’t feel any pity for myself. It’s just one foot after the other until JoAnn meets me at the park gate.
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| Mangrove root system |
The next morning we drive back up through the park’s rivers of grass, slash pine woods, savannas and miniature cypress forests with sharper eyes. We are rewarded with more birds than we can identify and one huge raptor atop a snag and so snow white that I can not be sure I saw it. I did not slam on the brakes as I wished I had since we were alone on the road this morning. But the momentum carried us past that point of stopping that we all wish at one time or another we had just given in to to slake our wonder, to believe our eyes.
The most outward exhibit of life in the Everglades are the birds.
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| vulture drying wings |
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| Miniature cypress forest |
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