WARNING: IF YOU DON'T LIKE A LOT OF NATURALIST GEEKERY, JUST SCROLL THROUGH THE PHOTOS. The text of this blog gets pretty nature-y.
Everglades National Park is one of our favorite national parks. It is unique in that it was the first national park so designated primarily because of its unique wildlife, vegetation and ecosystem, rather than because of its geology or landscapes. That being said, the landscape is sweeping and impressive. It is the largest wilderness east of the Mississippi and the third largest of the national parks. The Everglades are a network of wetlands and forests fed by a river flowing 1 mile every 4 days out of Lake Okeechobee, southwest into Florida Bay. The Park is the most significant breeding ground for tropical wading birds in North America, contains the largest mangrove ecosystem in the western hemisphere, is home to 36 threatened or protected species including the Florida panther, the American crocodile, and the West Indian manatee, and supports 350 species of birds, 300 species of fresh and saltwater fish, 40 species of mammals, and 50 species of reptiles. Freshwater sloughs are perhaps the most common ecosystem associated with Everglades National Park. These drainage channels are characterized by low-lying areas covered in fresh water, flowing at an almost imperceptible 100 feet per day. Shark River Slough and Taylor Slough are significant features of the park. Sawgrass growing to a length of 6 feet or more, and broad-leafed marsh plants, are so prominent in this region that they gave the Everglades its nickname "River of Grass." Freshwater marl prairies are the second most common ecosystem in the Everglades. They are similar to sloughs, but lack the slow movement of surface water. Instead, water seeps through a calcitic mud called marl. Algae and other microscopic organisms form periphyton, a mushy material reminiscent of wet bread, which attaches to limestone. When it dries it turns into a gray mud. Hammocks are often the only dry land within the park. They rise several inches above the grass-covered river, and are dominated by diverse plant life consisting of subtropical and tropical trees. One of the most well known of the hammocks is Mahogany Hammock, home to what may be the largest old-growth mahogany tree surviving in the United States.
We decided on this visit to camp at the Flamingo Campground for three nights. Flamingo is the most remote of the visitor centers and campgrounds in the Everglades. This visitor center was constructed in the 1960's, and one look at the architecture demonstrates that:
The view from the visitor center is tropical, with hundreds of small mangrove islands dotting Florida Bay to the south:
The day we arrived, a front was moving in from the north, bringing strong winds. You can see that it was a challenge to pitch our cabana. We had to guy ropes on all sides to keep it from taking flight:
We camped near a huge meadow of salt wort, a plant that attracts beautiful whitish-green butterflies. When we arrived, the butterflies were everywhere, like little fairies filling the sky, or like stars in the Milky Way. Here, one butterfly is settling onto one of the delicate wildflowers in the meadow:
Many others found our cabana screens welcome shelter from the wind, and found their way inside to perch for extended periods on the screens:
Our campground lay just on the shore of Florida Bay. A short walk from our campsite, through the tenting area, we could reach the bayshore, where one lone tree was struggling to keep its hold on the marly land:
With the wind came cold weather, but also crisp, clear skies. The sun was brilliant, even in the late afternoon. Here is where we pitched our tent, with the butterfly meadow in the background:
A wide variety of recreational and educational opportunities are available at Flamingo, ranging from paddling kayaks or canoes, taking boat tours, participating in ranger-led presentations and walks, hiking, bird-watching and bicycling. We selected several and the following sections of this blog entry summarize each.
1. RANGER LED BIRD WALK
Early Thursday morning, we hustled over to the Visitor Center for an 8:00 am ranger interpretive walk focusing on birds in the Everglades. We met on the breezeway of the Visitor Center from which we could see hundreds of wading birds occupying a sandbar several hundred yards from shore:
Florida Bay is very shallow - on average 3 to 4 feet. It is said that a 10 foot tall individual could walk all the way across Florida Bay to Marathon Key - provided s/he could pick his or her legs up out of the mud.
Here, a cormorant doesn't seem to have trouble tramping along the muddy shore:
As our guide, Ranger Christy, pointed out, a wide variety of birds could be found right at the Visitor Center. Here, two ibis are consorting with the tourists:
As we walked around the grounds, the ranger pointed a red-shouldered hawk, on the lookout for its next meal:
Osprey are ubiquitous. Even before the ranger walk, we counted over a dozen occupied osprey nests between the campground and the Visitor Center. However, our ranger had a few secrets to show us. Here, she pointed out an osprey perched in a tree and holding a sea trout it had just caught. The ranger said that this happens so often that she has grown used to identifying the fish each osprey catches.
Here is one of the osprey nests, high in a Visitor Center tree:
This osprey is one of a pair occupying a nest at the marina, amid the hustle and bustle of tourists renting canoes and kayaks and boarding boat tours:
2. RANGER-LED INTERPRETIVE TROPICAL TREE WALK
After lunch on Thursday, we returned to the Visitor Center for a walk led by Ranger Dan, to show us and explain the tropical trees that are found in the Everglades. The Everglades in particular, and the South Florida coastal areas in general, boast many tropical flora and fauna because the three large bodies of water that surround those areas - the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Okeechobee and the Atlantic Ocean - warm and stabilize the South Florida climate so that it is hospitable to plants and animals that would otherwise inhabit regions closer to the equator.
One of our favorite tropical trees here is the Gumbo Limbo tree. Ranger Dan likes to argue that the Gumbo Limbo tree killed Ponce de Leon. The story is complicated, but in brief, the Calusas, a large, war-like tribe of Native Americans who occupied the Everglades area when the Spanish arrived, had learned to draw the pitch of the Gumbo Limbo tree and put it on sticks to catch beautiful songbirds, which they would trade to the native Cubans, 90 miles away across the Florida Strait. This trade was so significant that the Calusas and the native Cubans formed strong alliances. The native Cubans, in turn, learned Spanish from their Spanish conquerors. Ponce de Leon was interested in meeting the Calusa chief in order to find the fabled Fountain of Youth - or maybe even some gold. The Calusas persuaded the native Cubans to convince de Leon that the Calusas would welcome him if he visited them. He did - and was murdered by the Calusas. This could only have happened because of the Gumbo Limbo tree.
Another unique tree is the Nickerbean, which bears spiky green pods. Each pod has two large round seeds, or beans, as Kathy shows in the photo below. Locals in the Everglades areas would take the beans, which are rubbery when green, and shape them into marbles or dice. After exposure to the air, the beans harden into a ceramic-like consistency and retain whatever shape they have been molded into. The hardened beans clack together inside the dried husks of their pods when the wind blows the Nickerbean tree. Kathy and I were repeatedly taken aback to hear the trees clacking around us in the wind as we walked back to the campground from our ranger walk.
One favorite tree in the Everglades is the Mahogany tree, easily identified by its distinctive pods (shown here in the upper reaches of this tree). Mahogany, of course, is a prized wood, and the vast majority of the mahogany trees in South Florida were logged off. Despite the fact that the designation of the Everglades as a national park was intended to protect large stands of old-growth mahogany found there, locals who were disgruntled about being displaced when the park was formed got their revenge by clear-cutting almost all of the mahogany in the Everglades. Only a few stands of old-growth mahogany survive today in the Everglades, although the Park Service is reintroducing the trees where appropriate. More on mahogany trees later.
Ranger Dan is a real show-and-tell performer. One of his favorite schticks is to demonstrate how to make fire using Buttonwood, a tree that is common in the Everglades:
Ranger Dan also introduced us to the Royal Palm - one that we've seen throughout Florida and identified by its long, pendant bunches of seeds or fruit - but which we did not know by name. In fact, one of the visitor centers in the Everglades is named for the Royal Palm.
Perhaps the most interesting tree story Ranger Dan told us is the sad story of the Cabbage Palm, which has the misfortune of playing host to the evil Strangler Fig. A local bird poops seeds of the Strangler Fig onto the boughs of the Cabbage Palm, where the seeds can take root. Once they do, they put forth an innocent looking vinous branch and leaves:
This is the beginning of the end for the unfortunate Cabbage Palm. Once it takes root, the Strangler Fig starts shooting tendrils down the trunk of its host, until those tendrils take root, and slowly overwhelm the Cabbage Tree. In this photo, you can just make out the dying figure of a Cabbage Tree, surrounded by trunk-like tendrils of the Strangler Fig:
3. PADDLE TOUR OF NINE MILE POND
Our alarm rang at 5:45 Friday morning to get us to our paddle tour by 7:45 am at Nine Mile Pond. Ranger Dan (again) led about 20 visitors on a canoe-and-kayak paddle through the mangrove forest in that area. Nine Mile Pond is unique for being near an ecotone - or margin of two different ecosystems. In this case, our paddle would take us from the mangrove swamps, or freshwater sloughs, up into the marl prairie. Here, one of our intrepid paddlers is heading right for an alligator. Luckily, neither party was harmed:
One unexpected and spectacular feature of the mangrove swamps are the varied and colorful epiphytes (some of these are also known as bromeliads), that root and grow on host mangrove trees. Here is one particularly colorful epiphyte we spotted:
Some of our paddling took us across large ponds. Some of the ponds are large "solution holes," which, like sinkholes, were created when groundwater dissolved the limestone bedrock, creating large depressions where the slow-moving water broadens and deepens. Other ponds were more mundanely created by humans when prior inhabitants - or the National Park Service as it was improving the park facilities - dug rock from some areas to fill in for roads and other facilities requiring solid, dry ground. It was a windy day, and we had to paddle hard to make a straight course across the open water.
Crossing into the marl prairie, we stopped for Ranger Dan to lecture us on the source, composition and role that periphyton plays in the wetland ecology:
4. HIKE TO SNAKE BIGHT
Having had lunch and rested from our paddle, we decided to bicycle about 6 miles to the trailhead for Snake Bight Trail which, along with the Gumbo Limbo Trail at the Royal Palms Visitor Center, is a rare walk through a mangrove forest. These are rare because mangrove live in water, and it is rare to find enough solid ground to make such a hike possible.
It appeared to us that the trail existed because someone had dredged a slough or canal on either side to build up the ground for the trail. However, this had to have been constructed long ago, because thick mangrove forest had had a chance to grow up (or return) in the area. Here is a view of a typical slough in the mangrove forest. In this case, the water was a golden brown, probably because it was not free-flowing. We found that, almost universally, the water in mangrove forests is crystal clear. We understand this is because the mangroves assist in filtering the waters they live in.
We spotted an unique inhabitant: a cactus!
There were plenty of bromeliads, including this one, that was bigger than Kathy!
Our destination on this hike was Snake Bight's tidal flats, where we saw shorebirds feeding in the mud left by the receding tide. A bight is a bay of a bay, and in this case, Snake Bight is a bay of Florida Bay.
5. ECO POND
Just an eighth of a mile or so from our campground is what was probably the site of the most prolific flocks of wading birds that we saw in the Flamingo area, including a sizeable number of Roseate Spoonbills. Here, one of those pink and rosy fellows swoops across Eco Pond, ignoring the snapping of tourists' shutters:
Eco Pond is prolific because it bears much of the bacterial and other microscopic life that feeds bugs and small fish - which in turn feed the birds. The pond can do this because - ironically - it was formerly a sludge pond used by the Park Service as outflow of water that came out of its local sewage treatment facility. Over the years, the muds build up bacteria that have supported wonderful diversity of wildlife. Never mind that faint odor that can arise occasionally from the pond.
We were able to stroll around Eco Pond just before sunset, and captured this small but roseate sunset to the west:
6. MAHOGANY HAMMOCK
If you're still awake, you may recall that the Everglades is home to the only remaining old growth stands of mahogany in the United States. One of these - and what may be the largest mahogany tree in the U.S. - is located at Mahogany Hammock. A hammock is a raised area of ground - possibly only a few inches higher than the surrounding wet prairie - that is sufficiently dry to support cypress, fir trees (pines or noble fir, for example) or, if higher and drier, hardwood trees such as mahogany.
We woke up on Saturday (no alarm - Yay!) and, after a leisurely coffee and breakfast, packed up camp and started home. We did, however, have a few stops to make on the 45-mile drive out of the park.
One was Mahogay Hammock. Here is our first glimpse of Mahogany Hammock, across the boardwalk, with one lone pine tree standing sentinel at the gate:
The hammock is an island in a River of Grass, and the scenery can be dramatic:
Another dramatic panoram is formed by the Dwarf Cypress that spread across the prairie. These are cypress trees, stunted by lack of water, that have gone dormant and lost their leaves in order to survive drought conditions. They paint stark, wintry brushstrokes across the landscape
More closely, there is just as much dramatic beauty. Here, an epiphyte is growing on a dormant Dwarf Cypress and giving forth a bright red flower:
After witnessing these beauties, we continued in search of our goal: the elusive "largest Mahogany Tree," which Kathy wanted desperately to hug.
Finally, we reached our goal. Here it was: the largest Mahogany tree! Kathy stretched out her arms in an affectionate gesture. But the tree was shy and would not approach to be embraced. Besides, there was a boardwalk barrier between them, and, oh yes, the tree was too big to get her arms around. Oh, well, but at least she found it!
Don't lose heart. Just around the next bend in the boardwalk, Kathy found another Mahogany tree that was much more huggable, and evidently more willing to be embraced:
Thus satisfied, we turned our truck back up across the Everglades prairie toward our home campground. We thought back on the camping trip and felt that it had been everything we'd hoped for. Well, perhaps not quite because it was chilly and windy - but, hey, maybe MORE than we hoped for because the result was that we no mosquitoes! So we would call this a VERY successful camping trip.
With this, we wave the Everglades a fond farewell, until some future year when we can return, perhaps with our own kayaks so that we can paddle more deeply into those mangrove sloughs and marl prairie waters.
