Chickens

When I started this blog in the summer of 2013, I never in my wildest imaginings thought I would be devoting a whole post to chickens. Nonetheless, that's exactly what I'm doing, even though the length of this post is succinct by my standards. I guess if my trip to Key West last month taught me anything, it's to be ready for anything in life and just go with it. I guess I didn't really learn that necessarily in Key West, but I imagine I would have if I stayed there long enough.

I think that one of the best things about stepping off your front doorstep and going someplace new is that every so often, you find something truly surprising or curious. In heading south to Key West for a couple of days I expected to find gorgeous scenery, good food and maybe a bar or two and I think I found all of that. But what I also found when we stepped off the Doubletree Hotel shuttle bus on our first trip downtown was a number of chickens roaming free. And I'm not talking about one or two or a fowl which should have been in someone's yard that got loose, these things are regular encounters on the streets of Key West. I found that both surprising and curious. And worth spending few paragraphs on.

When I'm in a strange place and I encounter wild chickens on the streets, I always ask the locals what the deal is here. Turns out they don't necessarily know. At least the ones we asked. The information offered to us was very non-specific. We were told by some of the vendors that we asked that the birds might be escaped captive chickens once kept as farming birds and that they might have been brought to Key West to combat the insect population. We were also told that "they've always been here." I'm doubting that last one. Maybe our sights were set too high. I can understand the convenience store clerk not knowing too much but we stopped in a Key West chickens themed shop and asked. I would think the woman in there would have been some sort of authority.

Now because I'm a curious guy, I had to find out the skinny on these things when I got back home. Turns out the internet doesn't necessarily know a whole lot more than the folks we asked on the island do. If there's one thing the internet seems to agree on, it's that the chickens are an introduced or feral species. There are no natural chicken predators on the island and the birds seem to be especially adept at controlling both the native cockroach and scorpion populations, which folks generally don't seem to mind. When the birds actually were brought to Key West seems to have the internet in a bit of a spot. Some reports I read claimed the chickens were brought to the island during the Great Depression as a sustainable way of putting food on the table; other articles claimed the chickens arrived with immigrants in the 1800s, maybe from Cuba who brought them not just for food but also for sport (meaning fighting each other). 

There doesn't seem to be any explanation as to why there are so many roaming free other than that's what chickens do in Key West. The initial reason is what I was after. I can accept that maybe a person or two released or lost a pet chicken every so often. But to get the quantity of chickens that you encounter in Key West must have required some sort of fowl freeing epidemic. I guess maybe it's one of those things lost in history. I've accepted after a few sessions of searching that I'm not getting to any sort of sure thing answer. Maybe I should be softer on the locals that we talked to.

I'm sure the chickens are great for the tourists. I mean they don't really affect our lives other than having to wait for one to cross the road (insert joke here) every so often when you are trying to get to the next bar. They are super colorful and generally harmless. I suppose if I were staying right in town, I might have been annoyed when I was awoken at sunrise by the crowing of a rooster, but fortunately our property out at the Doubletree was mercifully cockerel free. Anyway, that's all I have to say about these things. If you ever get to Key West, expect to see some chickens. I didn't.

The Last Keys

Hop in a car in Miami and drive south on U.S. Route 1 and you will eventually come to the end of the Florida mainland. Your drive time to the point will be about an hour or so and along the way you will pass strip mall after strip mall selling souvenirs and towels to tourists that almost exclusively seem to define the streetscape of southern Florida. Strip malls. Asphalt and concrete roads. And traffic lights about every quarter of a mile. The traffic lights are there to get you a better look at your surroundings by forcing you to stop every few minutes. It's not very pretty.

If you decide to make the drive and can persevere beyond the strip malls, you will come to one last traffic light and leave all that behind. Beyond that final traffic light, which is about 45 minutes or so into your drive, the road becomes a single lane each way bordered by a ten foot high barbed wire topped chain link fence with lush greenery beyond the fence. At this point, you are driving through the Everglades, the slowly-moving-southward water that is southern Florida outside of the strip malls and asphalt and concrete roads.

The barbed wire atop the fence on either side of the road is tilted out away from the road to keep humans on the highway and (if the signs on the side of the road are to be believed) crocodiles in the swamp and off the road. I think the fence is probably there for a reason. I would think the last thing you want to do on a single lane road is wait for a crocodile to cross in front of you, especially when the concrete median in the center of the road will likely make it turn back. All very slowly, I don't doubt.

When you reach the end of the mainland, U.S. Route 1 does not stop. Not even close. It keeps going for another couple of hours, stretching along an archipelago known as the Florida Keys all the way from Key Largo in the east to Key West where you will find the zero mile marker of Route 1. Before spending a couple of days exploring the Everglades last month just before Christmas, we made the trip past the strip malls, past the last traffic light on the mainland and all the way to the end of the road. My initial intent in planning this trip was to go see what all the fuss was about in Key West, which has at various times threatened or claimed to secede from the United States as the Conch Republic. While researching this quick vacation, I found reasons to go beyond Key West, and going beyond made this whole trip worthwhile.

The drive through the Keys on the Overseas Highway.

The Florida Keys stretch out across the gap between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico known as the Florida Straits. This waterway is critical to the naval defense of the southern United States and therefore the Keys being in the way is pretty darned convenient. They were originally inhabited by native Americans and were "discovered" by Juan Ponce de Leon on his quest for the fountain of youth in the early 1500s. For a while in the 1800s, Key West was the largest town in the entire state of Florida, supported almost entirely off an industry know as wrecking, which as the name suggests involved the recovery of valuable stuff from the many ships that unsuccessfully navigated the Florida Straits and wrecked.

For centuries, the Keys remained inaccessible to man except by boat. Then about 100 years ago, an overseas railway was built to connect Key West and all the Keys in between with the Florida mainland. If a railway made from steel or iron crossing saltwater in an area prone to violent hurricanes sounds to you like an accident waiting to happen, you'd be correct. In 1935, a Labor Day Category 5 hurricane wiped out an enormous section of the railway. For good as it turned out.

Following the 1935 hurricane, the remains of the railway were either abandoned or converted to the Overseas Highway, an extension of Route 1 that remains to this day. The drive from the U.S. mainland to Key Largo and down Route 1 to Key West was something I've wanted to do for a few years. I've seen movies with this lone concrete road supported from the sea floor with water on either side of the road as far as the eye can see and wanted to experience it for myself. The reality of the road did not live up to my anticipation. You can't really see anything over the sides of the highway. Yes, it's obvious that you are surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico but you don't get the sense you are driving over a large area of seawater, probably because the land areas are really close together.

Other than a stop for lunch in Key Largo for my first grouper sandwich of the trip, our drive through the Keys was fairly uneventful, although driving down the only road leading to Key West, you can't help thinking about what a complicated exercise a hurricane evacuation from these islands might be. There's only one road to get out by. I imagine planning needs to happen way in advance of that sort of event. As cool as the life in Key West may be, that's definitely not for me. I'm good visiting in December. I'll stay away during hurricane season.

Eventually Route 1 will end at the corner of Fleming and Whitehead Streets and you'll find yourself in Key West. Find a hotel, ditch the car and start walking around town is my recommendation. There's enough to see and do here to kill a couple of days and nights, although beyond that point I don't know. Key West has turned into one of those towns where drinking is a number one reason for most visitors being there so naturally there are collections of drunks walking up and down Duval Street acting stupidly just because everyone else is. Without all those people there, it would be an amazing place to visit.

Don't get me wrong, Key West definitely has its charms. Ernest Hemingway lived there for a time and his house is now preserved as a museum (we didn't visit - not much of a Papa fan) and we had some excellent fresh caught grouper, mahi mahi and snapper in every restaurant we visited. In fact, the food was just fantastic; I didn't know I liked fish so much before I was in Key West for a couple of days.

Key West is also the southernmost point in the continental United States and there's a red, yellow and black painted monument of sorts with some interpretive history signage around it to commemorate that fact, although I should point out it's not at the actual southernmost point on the island. The actual southernmost point is at Whitehead Spit, which is a few hundred yards west in the not-accessible-to-the-public Naval Air Station Key West.

But ultimately the reason I was in Key West was not to see the town but to actually head further west. You see, Key West, despite its name, is not the westernmost island in the Florida Keys. In fact, there are seven more islands that complete the Keys about 60 miles into the Gulf of Mexico. The largest of these, Garden Key, is open to visitors as a U.S. National Park but you can't drive there. This island, otherwise known as Dry Tortugas National Park, was my destination and it made my couple of days in the Keys totally worthwhile.

Dry Tortugas National Park is centered around Fort Jefferson, a six sided fortification which began construction in 1846 to provide the United States with a strategic military position in a critical shipping lane between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The Fort, which is constructed from over 16 million bricks and is the largest masonry structure in the United States, was in active use from its completion until the late 19th century when the invention of the rifled cannon rendered its fortifications useless.

Dry Tortugas from the air.

The island is completely surrounded by saltwater, which along with the complete isolation from the U.S. mainland, must have made life for the up to seventeen hundred soldiers (in earlier years) and five hundred or so soldiers plus 500 inmates (in later years when the Fort was used as a prison) extremely challenging. The Fort incorporated a series of cisterns within the fortified walls to capture and store rainwater. Today, supply boats running once a week keep the Park Service rangers stocked with supplies. I'm thinking in the mid 1800s that the supply boats were significantly less regular and feeding a couple of thousand soldiers then is way different than a couple of park rangers today.

The useful life of the Fort was relatively short, just about 40 years or so, for a place that must have taken a significant investment of labor and capital to build. Nonetheless, the place has some real notable history. In 1865, the four co-conspirators (other than John Wilkes Booth) in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were confined there. At least one of the four died in a yellow fever epidemic on the island before the Fort was abandoned by the military and turned over to the Marine Hospital Service as a quarantine station in 1888.

As a tourist in Key West, your options in getting to Dry Tortugas are fairly limited. Driving is out of the question. There are absolutely no roads that get you out there or really anywhere close. Mile Marker 0 of Route 1 might be about the closest automobile accessible point to the island. There's a ferry that leaves Key West at about 8 in the morning and takes a little more than two hours to get there. I'm sure the ride is very scenic and relaxing out there. I'm just not sure I want to take the same ride back to the main island beginning at 3 pm. At that point the excitement at the journey itself is probably gone.

The other option is to fly there. On a seaplane. It's a little more expensive than the ferry but not inordinately so (the ferry ain't cheap!) and it's way faster. The ride on the plane one way is about 40 minutes and journeys are offered as a half day (morning or afternoon) or full day package. Given the limited amount of time we allocated to spend in the Keys and slightly unsure of the appeal of spending a whole day out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, we opted for the half day package. And being a firm believer in the early bird getting the worm, I bought way in to the morning departure.

I've flown on a small plane before. When I was 16 I flew into the Grand Canyon in what I remember as a six seater but was just as likely something different. But I've never been on a plane that would land and take off from the water so at this point anything new like that in my life is exciting. I bit the bullet and bought a ticket.

There are immediate advantages to taking the plane. First of all, it's just cool as anything to take a plane out across the water. The flight altitude is about 500 feet all the way out there so you can really get a good understanding of the topography of the sea floor. You can see sea turtles swimming near the surface of the water, there are a couple of wrecked ships between Garden Key and Key West and every so often, you can catch a glimpse of a shark swimming in the shallower waters. It's obviously way quicker and the sea keeps my attention for just more than a half hour in a totally different way than it would for two hours plus. I'd recommend if you ever take this trip in the morning to sit on the left side of the plane on both the way out there and back. I sat on the right side. Awesome on the way out but the midday sun was brutal on the way back.

Our flight that morning was full, meaning a pilot and ten passengers, and fortunately everyone was early, meaning we got to leave early (the ferry is not leaving early, believe me) and spent an extra ten minutes or so on the island. This is not a commercial flight so don't expect the comforts, if you can call them that, of a jet airplane. Headsets are mandatory to drown out the engine noise and your ventilation control is rotating a quarter sphere shaped piece of plastic connected to a hole in the window next to your head. The sensation of landing on water is really pretty cool as is the takeoff on the way back. I'm not sure I'll ever get this chance again, although you never know.

When you take the early plane to the island, you arrive at a place that has just two or three park rangers and maybe a handful of overnight campers, meaning you are 60 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico with about 15 or so other people and a whole lot of pelicans on a glorified sandbar with an historic pre-Civil War era fort. It was just like being marooned on a secluded desert island, albeit with a cooler full of bottled water, some snorkeling gear and a promise from our pilot to be back to collect us in three and a half hours. Once the plane leaves, you are there almost alone.

The Fort today offers a number of activities for the curious tourist. There are coral reefs with a number of species of fish to explore with a face mask and a pair of flippers. There are a ton of pelicans and other species of birds, which I have to say I cannot identify, to check out both on Garden Key and the adjacent bird sanctuary. There's the Fort to explore on a self-guided tour. And there are seemingly endless expanses of water to gaze out over and imagine what life must have been like for some teenage or early 20s soldier when the Fort was in active duty.

I'll say a couple of things about the place. First, my swimming skills have atrophied over the years and snorkeling was difficult after about a half an hour in the water. My teenage self that spent hours in our backyard pool each week in the summer would be embarrassed. The fish spotting in and around the old coal pilings on the north side of the island was good but it's not like the kind of variety you can get in the Caribbean, which to this novice snorkeler, was about as amazing as I think I will ever see.

Walking around and through the Fort was fantastic, whether it was strolling around the sea wall that formed a sort of moat around the Fort while watching sergeant majors and other sorts of fish searching for food in the sea right below your feet or exploring the inside of the Fort learning about how the place operated about a century and a half ago. The best part was probably on the ramparts climbing over the old cannons and around the lighthouse with the light blue Gulf waters all around about 50 feet below.

Fort Jefferson from the ground...

….and from the top of the rampart.

But the best part of being on the island for a little more than three hours or so, which was just a little too short (I could have used maybe another hour) was the absolute silence of the place. It's a rare thing for me to get to a spot where there are precious few other humans and where cell phone towers are mercifully out of range. I know there were maybe 15 or so other folks out there with us but honestly I didn't notice. It's definitely big enough that you can spread out. Listening to the waves breaking on the sea wall and our footsteps on the beach or paved surfaces within the Fort with no other sound was amazing. It almost felt like we should be whispering because the quiet we experienced out there is so rare in our lives today.

While the silence was without doubt the best part, which still seems sort of strange, if we had taken the ferry or even the afternoon flight, we wouldn't have experienced this and our trip would not have been so special. From atop the Fort's wall at about 11:15 that morning, we watched the ferry arrive and discharge its entire 150 people or however many the ferry holds passenger load onto the island. Right then the experience would never be the same. Fortunately at that moment, our return ride home had arrived and it was time to go, although we still found about 15 minutes or so to watch pelicans dive into the water in search of food after climbing down from the walls of the Fort.

Dry Tortugas is one of the least visited U.S. National Parks. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the most visited) boasts over 9,000,000 visitors per year; Dry Tortugas manages about 60,000 per year, about three days' worth to the Smoky Mountains. It's not easy to get to, but the trip there is well worthwhile. The Keys definitely wouldn't have been as enjoyable without getting on a plane and flying out there for a morning. There's a lot to like about Key West, even with all the drunks and the seemingly endless Jimmy Buffett music, but the Keys wouldn't be the same without exploring all of them, all the way to the real key west.

Our ride home. The plane, not the pelicans.

King of the world!

River Of Grass

Seems like good advice to me, even without the pictogram.

In June of 2010, I took a trip to Miami Beach, Florida. It was a place I never really wanted to go and I honestly never really thought I'd go back. I made the trip down there that year because the American Institute of Architects in their infinite wisdom decided to schedule their annual convention there and back then I was in the habit of attending that event every other year and 2010 was my year. And yes, you read that right. Convention. In June. In Miami Beach. Go figure.

Even though I never really wanted to go in the first place, I figured why not? I love to travel and I'm OK traveling every once in a while for work even though it always ends up being way more work than travel. I don't care for beaches, I overheat easily (think insulating layer of blubber here), I don't like clubbing and I was pretty sure I wouldn't like the people hanging out in Miami Beach. But it was a couple of days and it was free. Hence the why not. I'll check a spot off my list, have some Cuban food, see some Art Deco hotels and then never go back. And not just to Miami Beach. To south Florida in general. Why on Earth would I want to go back there?

When I boarded the plane at National Airport that June, I honestly thought it was the last time I'd be headed to Miami, at least of my own free will. But something happened on the flight down there that made me change my mind and I've thought about going back a lot in the last three and a half years because of it. Our flight that day was scheduled to land to the north, despite the fact that we were very definitely flying south all the way. So before we could land, our pilot circled south and west of the airport to turn around before landing. And that's when I looked out the window.

Flying over Florida is fascinating. It looks like somebody rolled out the surface of the Earth to about the thickness of a piece of paper. There may be some trees here and there and a little water showing through the crust but the rest of the land is dead flat. I mean like purely horizontal. Like not a hill or bump anywhere. But when our flight in June that year circled to land, what I saw was the surface of the Earth unlike I have ever seen before. It looked more like a petri dish or something I find in the back of my refrigerator after some food I made has been there a couple of months (it happens...) without seeing the light of day.

Florida from the air, December 2014.

The land appeared to be some sort of glistening, greenish-ochre, moist, gelatinous mass, with red, brown or green tufts that I could only assume were plants but which really looked more like mold spores. There were no buildings or roads but every so often the land was punctuated by leftover shaped pools of water or cut by a waterway which appeared as a gash in the land. It honestly looked like the set for the Mordor scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies, only a lot sunnier. It was the Everglades. And I made a promise to myself that I would return one day to south Florida to see it a lot closer than the thousands of feet above the Earth I was that on June morning. Last month, I fulfilled that promise.

The Everglades originally spanned some approximately 120 miles from Lake Okeechobee (the large opening you see on maps of Florida near the bottom part of the state) to the Gulf of Mexico. For lack of a more precise term right now, the territory that makes up the 'glades is actually a moving waterway flowing south at a rate of about a quarter of a mile per day. Man has of course interfered here in an ignorant way and changed what used to be. The effects of that involvement are seen close to Lake Okeechobee, where land that was once part of the Everglades is now filled in for Floridians to live and farm on; corrective measures have been taken to restore water flow but it's likely not quite the same. We might consider ourselves lucky. At one time in the history of our country, there were many people living around the Everglades who would have preferred to just fill them in so we could use them for something different. The effects would likely have been disastrous.

We were saved from ourselves here largely by two people: Ernest Coe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Coe was a landscape architect from Connecticut who retired to south Florida and was alarmed at what he saw as unchecked destruction of the fragile Everglades ecosystem. Stoneman was a writer for the Miami Herald who correctly saw the Everglades as a river and not a swamp. Her book, The Everglades: River of Grass, was instrumental in educating the public about the true nature of the future park. As you might expect when conservationists and developers are arguing about valuable land with politicians serving as arbiters, the process took a while but ultimately through Coe's efforts, Everglades National Park was established in 1947 by President Truman. The park preserves approximately 20% of the total area of the Everglades.

Sawgrass marsh.

The Everglades is unique among the National Parks in the United States. When you think of the National Park System, most people think of scenery, natural wonders that make your spirit soar and your heart fall in love with the planet we live on. Think mountains, canyons, forests, breathtaking views and vistas. Think Ansel Adams, bison roaming around Yellowstone, the alien rock landscape that make up the Badlands in South Dakota or six foot plus high snowdrifts on July 4 halfway up Mount Rainier. The Everglades is none of this. It's mostly water. It was created as a National Park first and foremost to preserve the ecosystem that is home to hundreds of species of birds, mammals, fish and reptiles. There is no other U.S. National Park like it. And there likely never will be.

Visiting the Everglades is difficult. First of all, it's an enormous place. It's the third largest National Park in the continental United States after Yellowstone and Death Valley. In all, it's about twice the size of Rhode Island. OK, so being twice the size of Rhode Island doesn't necessarily make it that big. The real issue with the Everglades that makes it difficult to get around is that almost all of it is water, which pretty much means you need a boat. And I don't have one, nor was I about to rent one.

In 2011, I managed to cover the entire loop road within Yellowstone National Park, which is about 1.5 times the size of the Everglades, in a day, but you can't drive around the Everglades the way you can around Yellowstone. There is pretty much just one road inside the park which runs from the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center on the eastern edge of the park to the Flamingo Visitor Center at the south edge of the park where mainland Florida meets the Gulf of Mexico. The road is about 40 miles long and you get back out just the way you came in. 

There are two other visitor centers in the park, the Gulf Coast and Shark Valley Visitor Centers, but neither is accessible from within the park. Instead, you have to drive out of the park, north along Route 997 then west along Route 41 which defines the northern edge of the park for a while before cutting through the Big Cypress National Preserve and then eventually linking up with the northwest corner of the park. Herein lies the difficulty in covering the Everglades quickly. The only roads to access most of the park are on the perimeter of the park with small roads which enter from the perimeter but don't connect to anything else. There's no other way to get there, unless you are in a boat, and that's not that simple either.

The Everglades encompass an incredibly diverse part of our planet. Within the park, there are six different ecosystems which can be explored, each serving as home to a unique collection of plant and wildlife species. It includes saltwater and freshwater environments, mangrove and cypress wildernesses, pinelands and tropical hardwood hammocks and miles upon miles of sawgrass growing in the slowly moving water. There is so much to see. Planning a trip which devotes a little more than a day of time within the park involved making some decisions about what to see and what not to see. Some things just had to be left on the cutting room floor.

My initial desire to visit the Everglades was stirred by flying far overhead and staring down at the strange landscape. Knowing what I know now, you can actually see different environments within the park from the air which look distinctly different. But seeing something strange from the air and exploring the land are two different things. When it came down to the reality of sightseeing last month, I wanted to see as much different wildlife as possible. And that probably meant exploring different parts of the park. Which meant a lot of driving. And it was so worth it.

I started my journey on day one in the park by entering near the Coe Visitor Center, which serves as the park headquarters, and decided I would stop at a couple of places to see what I could find. I pretty much knew I would get to see a lot of different types of wading birds but my hope was that I would see an alligator. A minimum of one. That's all I needed. I knew I picked the right time of year to visit when the water was the lowest and rainfall was the most scarce so wildlife would congregate around remaining open watering areas. I sincerely hoped I wouldn't be disappointed.

An anhinga, showing off.

First stop: the Anhinga Trail, an approximately one mile long trail which takes you into a sawgrass marsh, home to alligators, wading birds and the very noisy and demonstrative anhinga bird, which feeds on the fish in the marsh by swimming underwater and nests in the trees nearby. But before setting foot on the trail, we had to do one more thing first: tarp the car. That's right. 

When we first drove into the parking area for the trail, we wondered if we had screwed up somehow. Most all the cars in the lot were covered with large blue tarps, strapped to the cars' bodies and wheels with bungee cords. Did I miss something? I didn't recall reading the notice to B.Y.O.T. when I was preparing for my trip. Figuring we had made a mistake and that the tarps were there to protect the cars from bird droppings, we parked away from all tress and hoped for the best.

And then we promptly changed our mind. When we got to the bin of tarps and bungee cords (figures, right?), we read a notification that the turkey vultures that live in the park apparently like to strip the rubber off cars' windshield wipers and sometimes even have a go at the window gaskets. I have no idea why but didn't stop to ask questions. The last thing we needed was a bill from the rental car company for missing rubber on our brand new 2015 car. So we turned our vehicle into a sort of mini Christo sculpture and hoped that was good enough. Yes, the pun was intentional.

When I visited Yellowstone in 2011, I hoped I would see a bison, not really understanding how many of them there are in the park. About five minutes in to the park on that trip, we found a male bison walking down the center of the road. Then we saw a couple more grazing about 20 minutes later. Then one near the cafeteria just hanging out that night. Then whole herds near the road. Finally, on our way out of the park, we were surrounded by a herd who walked around our stopped car inches from where we were sitting. In short, they were everywhere.

My quest to see an alligator in the Everglades pretty much matched my bison seeking trip three years ago, although thankfully, we didn't have our car surrounded by a congregation (seriously, look it up) of alligators at any time in the couple of days we were there. As soon as our feet hit the Anhinga Trail, we spotted an alligator sunning itself on the far bank of the pond behind the visitor center with another one cruising nearby in the water. Then we saw another at the edge of the sawgrass from the raised wooden walkway that forms part of the trail. Then another couple, closer together this time and then a couple more on the near bank, just beyond the very open fence separating the paved portion of the trail from the wildlife.

Before we explored the last portion of the trail, I have to comment on how disconcerting it is to be walking a few feet from a five foot long or so sleeping alligator with only a wooden fence about 18 inches high with no sort of barrier whatsoever between you and it. Don't these things kill people? We actually talked about walking by the alligator when some less athletic people walked by…after all, we don't have to outrun the alligator; we just have to run faster than the slowest human, right? Ultimately, nothing happened and we found out later we are far too big for alligators to target but still…if it had been really hungry? I don't know.

The last part of the Anhinga Trail revealed a mother lode of alligators. It's only maybe a hundred or so feet long and is raised above the landscape around you. Waiting for us at the end were about 12 alligators of various size, all asleep in the mid-day sun of course. Being that close to wildlife that is actually wild was impressive despite the fact they are not the prettiest of creatures. I definitely saw what I came to see. Just like the bison in Yellowstone, the alligators in the Everglades proved to be everywhere.

Alligators right below our feet.

The Anhinga Trail was a fantastic place to start my Everglades experience. In addition to the boatload of alligators, we got the chance to see cormorants, snowy egrets, great blue herons, green-backed herons, a purple gallinule (walking on top of the lilypads that floated on top of the water) and, of course, some anhingas. I see birds of some sort probably every day of my life but these wading and fishing birds are exciting to see. They are way larger than the types of birds I see near Washington, D.C. and to see them in the wild is fantastic. We really got to see the circle of life by watching anhingas fish and capture their prey and by waiting and watching for a while, we managed to see a tiny green-backed heron sit almost totally still for about five minutes before plucking some sort of insect off the surface of the water.

We ended day one in the Everglades by taking a short five or so mile drive further into the park to check out the Pa-hay-okee Overlook, a quarter mile or so long trail that gets you above the saw grass marsh into the top of trees level. There was nothing much to see at the overlook itself but the drive there got us a good look at three enormous wood storks, one standing right by the side of the road before taking flight, probably in response to us getting a bit too close to snap a pic. Day one was definitely a success.

The first day got us a good look at the sawgrass marshes in the park and all our time was spent in the car or on foot. Since you can't really experience the Everglades without getting onto the water, day two was boat focused. To get to a boat, we decided to drive across the state to the town of Everglades City, where the Gulf Coast Visitor Center is located, and take a tour both in the freshwater mangroves and set sail (or motor in this case) on the more open brackish water around the Ten Thousand Islands. Each got us a look at a different ecosystem and some more wildlife.

If you are planning a trip out to the western edge of the Everglades, I'd definitely recommend a boat ride or two. We took two: one into a mangrove wilderness and one out away from the main park into the Ten Thousand Islands. For me, the mangrove boat tour was way more valuable than the Ten Thousand Islands tour but that might have had a lot to do with who was on each boat with us.

One of the Ten Thousand Islands, with hundreds of white pelicans on the sandbar closest to the boat.

The Ten Thousand Islands are a series of mangrove growths which dot the west coast of the park between the freshwater river and the Gulf of Mexico. The water is wide open in parts and you generally don't find alligators here, which I regarded as the ultimate find before my second day looking for wildlife. We managed to see a small pod of dolphins, a magnificent frigate bird from a great distance and a massive group of white pelicans, but that was about as exciting as it got. The boat that takes you into the islands is pretty sizable and our tour probably had 30 or so people on it. Boats like that are perfect for seeing large groups of wildlife from afar but don't offer the ability to get close to what you see or customized tours based on local daily conditions. I'm sure if we had seen more, I would be a lot more enthusiastic about this ride. Don't let my words deter you if you are down there.

The mangrove tour, on the other hand, was fantastic. It's a six person (seven with the pilot) flat-bottomed boat that takes you deep into thick mangrove stands and by islands made entirely of oyster shells. The water here is extremely shallow, especially at low tide when we were lucky enough to go, which meant that we needed to take some parts of the journey at a high speed so the boat would hydroplane on top of the water and not risk getting stuck in the mud. I endorsed this idea. The last thing I want to do is get stuck in a tiny boat waiting for the tide to rise.

Wading birds looking for food, ready to split if our boat gets too close.

Low water means food on the bottom of the channels, sandbars and rivers is within close reach so there were plentiful herons, egrets and especially ibis walking around carefully in search of food and dipping their bills into the water for a meal. Pelicans fished the deeper parts of the water by dive bombing fish to stun them, then scooping them up in their beak pouches for either immediate consumption or a snack later on in the day. Generally speaking we were able to get pretty close to these birds, they seemed largely unfazed by our small boat, especially when our pilot cut the engine.

After a half hour or so looking for wading birds and alligators (unfortunately we saw just one on the trip) we headed into the mangroves. Wildlife-wise, we saw absolutely nothing in the mangroves except a family of raccoons searching for food. As unbelievable as it sounds considering we have raccoons in Virginia, watching an adult and three baby raccoons gathering food was actually amazing. They seemed to be so disciplined and methodical about it and the mother was clearly keeping watch over all three young 'uns.

In the mangroves.

Getting into the mangroves really got us a look at another side of the park which was totally different from everywhere else we went. When the canopy of trees completely closes overhead, the park becomes a little sinister and scary. I could imagine being in these things at sunset or night cruising through the swamp totally lost evading alligators and snakes and other things that might do me harm. Our pilot, Josh, told us stories about drug smugglers using the Everglades as an entry point to bring contraband into the country. I could totally see that as our tiny boat wended it's way through the vegetation.

I'd be remiss if I didn't give a lot of credit to Josh as a big reason why our mangrove tour was the best thing I did in the Everglades despite the almost complete lack of alligator sightings on that trip. This guy knew his stuff, despite telling us over and over he was not a park ranger or any sort of credentialed wildlife expert. We found a ton of birds both inside the park and in the bay (up-close osprey sightings are really special) and he offered valuable insight as to where to stop to see additional wildlife on our drive back to our hotel in Miami, including where to see manatees.

I firmly believe if we hadn't have taken the mangrove tour with Josh, we would have missed out on manatees on our trip. We spent a good portion of our tour talking about where to find them and how to spot them, including several minutes just sitting floating with the engine off to no avail. The silence in the park with the outboard killed is just stunning by the way. But having spotted nothing resembling a manatee, and with time running short on our tour time, we had to head back to the dock.

Manatee? Maybe.

Our mangrove tour was supposed to last an hour and 45 minutes. We were already pushing that time when we got into the bay when Josh spotted a mud cloud below the water, which is a signature footprint of a manatee. Manatees feed on the plants on the bottom of the water and leave behind plumes of mud in the water when they pull their food from the channel floor. Despite the time pressure, we stopped. And waited for more mud plumes or for a nose to poke out of the water and exhale / inhale. 

After a couple of minutes, we heard a noise and got a glimpse of our first manatee, even if it was no more than a bump where its nose broke the surface. A couple of minutes later there was another. Then another. Maybe a mother and calf feeding. It wasn't much, but it was exciting, especially when a couple of dolphins joined the hunt with us. We had to head back, so we did, arriving about a minute before 11 when Josh's next tour was supposed to leave. Along the way back to the dock, he told us to stop at the Big Cypress National Park Visitor Center in Ochopee and look in the water.

Ochopee is maybe a 25 minute drive from the Everglades Gulf Coast Visitor Center. There's a visitor center there by the side of the road with a small parking lot out front. Walk through the visitor center, past the almost alarming life size fake alligator, and there's a wooden walkway beyond which, through vegetation next to the walk, looks over a freshwater canal which holds fish, alligators and, when we were there, four of five manatees.

Manatee? Definitely! It's the pale horizontal shape in the center of the ripple.

Wait for a ripple in the water and watch, eventually they will show themselves. While you can't see much from the walkway, it's high enough and the water is calm enough (like absolutely still) for you to see the entire length of the animals. These things are huge but it's well worth stopping. The walkway is short, maybe about the size of a football field without the end zones, but we spent about 30 minutes there watching the few manatees that were in the canal that day. This is an animal you rarely get to see anywhere, unless you live on the gulf coast of Florida I guess. Treasure the opportunity.

The boat tours we took on day two of our Everglades trip were run by the Everglades National Park Boat Tours, Inc. They are not cheap; it will set you back about $75 for both. But I wouldn't have had the same visit without them. You just can't see the Everglades from the land only. I'm sure I just scratched the surface of what this park offers, even with our last couple of stops at the H.P. Williams Roadside Park and Big Cypress National Reserve Visitor Center (the main one, not the one in Ochopee), which both offered another pile of alligators and birds for us to look at. I'd love to go back sometime, maybe in a few years when I've finished this blog. It would definitely be worth a second trip.

Osprey nest. Ospreys return to the same nest every year and expand each year.