Thursday, March 29, 2012
Tired of politics, New Yorkers give “If you don’t use it you lose it” advice to Florida: visit Everglades National Park
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Tired of politics, New Yorkers give “If you don’t use it you lose it” advice to Florida: visit Everglades National Park
As New Yorkers on vacation in South Florida, specifically in the Florida Keys, we are not into the Miami South Beach high life. We are not fishermen either, as our Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Canadian snowbird neighbors are (or were, in younger years). So, why the Keys, coral rock islands with few beaches, where big action is on Wednesdays, when the Key Largo public library stays open till 8 PM, facilitating snowbirds’ communications with the grandchildren. So, what's the secret?
Well, it’s not the fleshpots of Key West, or the gambling at the Indian Casino. It is Everglades National Park, one of the world's finest viewing arenas of water culture, change, destruction and recovery. But that's heavy, let me mention water birds, herons, giant white egrets, ibises, diving anhingas, being watched by alligators, snakes, walking mangroves overtaking waters, their floating seedpods that take roots whenever they touch bottom, airplants in tree branches, living on what floats by. Florida has no grand canyons ( except maybe the mountains of garbage) and might wash over as the icebergs melt and oceans expand (my dear friends the Midwestern climate change deniers notwithstanding). So, any New Yorkers vacationing in the greater Miami area are advised to drive down US1 to Homestead, turn west onto Route 9336 and go two miles until you see “Robert Is Here” fruit market, a destination, then turn left and a few miles later turn right following the brown sign, then travel past the rich Redlands tomato fields until the entrance to the Everglades National Park. If eligible, use your seniors' National Parks Pass, $10 at age 62, and good for admission of your carload of passengers, valid countrywide, and forever. In NYC’s Central Park, animal life was once more accessible. Now, visiting the Central Park Zoo costs up to $18/per person, for one-time visit.
Your first and best destination to the natural miracles of Everglades is just some five miles after the entrance, at Palm Court. It is the Anhinga Trail, a mile plus loop past the guest center, along a stream, the bank full of cormorants, big black fishing birds watching the creatures in the water, also you and the alligators who float right along the fish, looking for a meal, foul or aquarian. You are seeing all this interplay right before you for a long passage, interspersed with white egrets, green herons and small duck like purple gallinules, and an occasional turtle.
Departing from the walking path, a boardwalk carries you to the hammock even deeper.
At this point, let's explain that the entire Everglades is a fifty-mile wide slow-moving “River of Grass,” named ny naturalist Margaret Stoneham Douglas in her 1940s book. It flows over a flat prairie, with tree islands (hammocks) here and there. At least it was thus before the Army Corps of Engineers , between the World Wars, started to dig ditches and direct water traffic and destroy natural flow. Some of it has since been fixed.
Back to our walk, we see trees with long above ground roots, but they are not the red mangrove "walking men”, they are sweetwater apple, and they carry puffs and puffs of airplants, looking like little agaves, and known to hold small dollops of rainwater in their leaf hollows, essential for survival in the tropics and sometimes even helping out a thirsty wayfarer. In the trees roost anhingas, the diving waterbirds who have to dry heir wings in the sunlight, often above the nest, communicating in what I call "anhinga song," a monotonous tune that sounds like rusty wheels on a slow moving hay wagon. But it has its charms, particularly when you have viewed the bird diving and swimming underwater for distances, seeking to spear an unwary fish, even a thin gar, a swift mover. Then the anhinga surfaces, tosses the fish in the air and opens its beak, swallowing the critter whole.
The alligators are always there, providing the potential of drama, however brief, their catching and swallowing the prey is just a blur.
The anhinga trail is the most active and interesting of the Everglades wonders.
In spring the walkway is overrun by professio0nal photographers from nature publications and news media, quietly watching their targeted birds until they position themselves just right. These quiet paparazzi are often interest ting sources of bird identification and stories, having traveled through the parks throughout the country.
After the anhingas, take the 9336 path 30-plus miles south, to Flamingo, a small town and center of water trips, canoes at sunset into the bay, and motorboat tours into the canals the Army dug through the Everglades. One, a 1 3/4 tour for $25, takes you through the charming Buttonwood Canal to the Coot Lake, then via Tarpon Crek back to Buttonwood and Flamingo. At the start, you get to meet several American crocodiles, colored grey, with a slim head, who survive in the estuary, i.e. meeting point of sweet river and salty ocean water. The three mile canal, an ecological disaster when dug in 1957, has been closed off, to keep the downriver sweet water distributed inland, and to contain the onrushing ocean water that kills the native river fish. The mangroves which live in both waters, have been an economic boon, with their leaves in the water providing natural food and shelter for shrimp and other sea creatures, and helping the fishing industry.
Along the sides of the canal one can see the power of the mangroves, red, black and white, which need be cut back periodically lest they overwhelm the waterway and close it. In 1960, hurricane Donna did just that, ripping down hundreds of years’ growth of mangroves and demolishing their natural canopies over the canals. Since then, the growth has come back, with great power. Even orchids now grow in the canals, and park police must watch out for orchid poachers.
One of the nasty surprises in the mangrove jungle is a mangrove-like tree, but with drooping yellow-green leaves, seemingly suffering. It is the deadly manchineel tree, whose sap can eat through layers of skin and attack inner organs, The hardy Calusa Indians, original Florida inhabitants, now extinct due to disease and colonialist tactics, did away wit some of their Spanish conquistador men with arrows dipped in manchineel oil. Never touch a leaf. There are some such trees in the Key Largo natural forest north of the town, which when last seen, were marked by a sharpyed ranger ( Nemetz?).
There are aloe snakes in the Everglades prairie, crossed and portaged by canoers, a 99-mile water and land route for the hearty, which joins Flamingo and Everglade City further west. Four of the 26 varieties are poisonous, two rattlesnake, a water moccasin and a small coral snake, most deadly. The Burmese python, introduced by kiddies who bought the cute snake and dumped it a few years later when it grew, now is destroying the native fauna, and not just rabbits. Ecologists re trying to find a harmless way to get rid of them, poisoning would affect the ecology. If you have ideas, call snakeman Jim Duquesnel (1-888-IVE-GOT1). If you want to see one, in Key Largo, on a cool morning they may crawl on to a quiet asphalt road that has retained last evening's warmth. Ask islanders how the pythons got across the Bay, and they shudder.
Next point to visit on a quick trip is a mile or two along 9336, past Flamingo is the famed Eco Pond, a huge tree in a pond, a natural roosting place for the night for all birds, safe from foxes and other predators who cannot get across the waterBest visit is at a late afternoon. Unfortunately, the tree was destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, and the area was covered by mud. Now it has recovered, the tree has shot up new branches and all will be well in another decade.
These are just highspots, there are some dozen more hammocks, trails and observation points along the 38 miles that will tease you, and then there is the Shark Valley Center along the Tamiami Trail, Rte 41, where a tram will take you through alligator territory, to avoid your stepping on any of the creatures and hurting each other. Send this article of Everglades highspots to your Miami friends, perhaps they‘d like to invest a day or two to visiting their park. It’s like visiting Central Park in NYC, so few of us do it. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
Wally Dobelis thanks NYTimes and internet sources and various tour guides
Tired of politics, New Yorkers give “If you don’t use it you lose it” advice to Florida: visit Everglades National Park
As New Yorkers on vacation in South Florida, specifically in the Florida Keys, we are not into the Miami South Beach high life. We are not fishermen either, as our Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Canadian snowbird neighbors are (or were, in younger years). So, why the Keys, coral rock islands with few beaches, where big action is on Wednesdays, when the Key Largo public library stays open till 8 PM, facilitating snowbirds’ communications with the grandchildren. So, what's the secret?
Well, it’s not the fleshpots of Key West, or the gambling at the Indian Casino. It is Everglades National Park, one of the world's finest viewing arenas of water culture, change, destruction and recovery. But that's heavy, let me mention water birds, herons, giant white egrets, ibises, diving anhingas, being watched by alligators, snakes, walking mangroves overtaking waters, their floating seedpods that take roots whenever they touch bottom, airplants in tree branches, living on what floats by. Florida has no grand canyons ( except maybe the mountains of garbage) and might wash over as the icebergs melt and oceans expand (my dear friends the Midwestern climate change deniers notwithstanding). So, any New Yorkers vacationing in the greater Miami area are advised to drive down US1 to Homestead, turn west onto Route 9336 and go two miles until you see “Robert Is Here” fruit market, a destination, then turn left and a few miles later turn right following the brown sign, then travel past the rich Redlands tomato fields until the entrance to the Everglades National Park. If eligible, use your seniors' National Parks Pass, $10 at age 62, and good for admission of your carload of passengers, valid countrywide, and forever. In NYC’s Central Park, animal life was once more accessible. Now, visiting the Central Park Zoo costs up to $18/per person, for one-time visit.
Your first and best destination to the natural miracles of Everglades is just some five miles after the entrance, at Palm Court. It is the Anhinga Trail, a mile plus loop past the guest center, along a stream, the bank full of cormorants, big black fishing birds watching the creatures in the water, also you and the alligators who float right along the fish, looking for a meal, foul or aquarian. You are seeing all this interplay right before you for a long passage, interspersed with white egrets, green herons and small duck like purple gallinules, and an occasional turtle.
Departing from the walking path, a boardwalk carries you to the hammock even deeper.
At this point, let's explain that the entire Everglades is a fifty-mile wide slow-moving “River of Grass,” named ny naturalist Margaret Stoneham Douglas in her 1940s book. It flows over a flat prairie, with tree islands (hammocks) here and there. At least it was thus before the Army Corps of Engineers , between the World Wars, started to dig ditches and direct water traffic and destroy natural flow. Some of it has since been fixed.
Back to our walk, we see trees with long above ground roots, but they are not the red mangrove "walking men”, they are sweetwater apple, and they carry puffs and puffs of airplants, looking like little agaves, and known to hold small dollops of rainwater in their leaf hollows, essential for survival in the tropics and sometimes even helping out a thirsty wayfarer. In the trees roost anhingas, the diving waterbirds who have to dry heir wings in the sunlight, often above the nest, communicating in what I call "anhinga song," a monotonous tune that sounds like rusty wheels on a slow moving hay wagon. But it has its charms, particularly when you have viewed the bird diving and swimming underwater for distances, seeking to spear an unwary fish, even a thin gar, a swift mover. Then the anhinga surfaces, tosses the fish in the air and opens its beak, swallowing the critter whole.
The alligators are always there, providing the potential of drama, however brief, their catching and swallowing the prey is just a blur.
The anhinga trail is the most active and interesting of the Everglades wonders.
In spring the walkway is overrun by professio0nal photographers from nature publications and news media, quietly watching their targeted birds until they position themselves just right. These quiet paparazzi are often interest ting sources of bird identification and stories, having traveled through the parks throughout the country.
After the anhingas, take the 9336 path 30-plus miles south, to Flamingo, a small town and center of water trips, canoes at sunset into the bay, and motorboat tours into the canals the Army dug through the Everglades. One, a 1 3/4 tour for $25, takes you through the charming Buttonwood Canal to the Coot Lake, then via Tarpon Crek back to Buttonwood and Flamingo. At the start, you get to meet several American crocodiles, colored grey, with a slim head, who survive in the estuary, i.e. meeting point of sweet river and salty ocean water. The three mile canal, an ecological disaster when dug in 1957, has been closed off, to keep the downriver sweet water distributed inland, and to contain the onrushing ocean water that kills the native river fish. The mangroves which live in both waters, have been an economic boon, with their leaves in the water providing natural food and shelter for shrimp and other sea creatures, and helping the fishing industry.
Along the sides of the canal one can see the power of the mangroves, red, black and white, which need be cut back periodically lest they overwhelm the waterway and close it. In 1960, hurricane Donna did just that, ripping down hundreds of years’ growth of mangroves and demolishing their natural canopies over the canals. Since then, the growth has come back, with great power. Even orchids now grow in the canals, and park police must watch out for orchid poachers.
One of the nasty surprises in the mangrove jungle is a mangrove-like tree, but with drooping yellow-green leaves, seemingly suffering. It is the deadly manchineel tree, whose sap can eat through layers of skin and attack inner organs, The hardy Calusa Indians, original Florida inhabitants, now extinct due to disease and colonialist tactics, did away wit some of their Spanish conquistador men with arrows dipped in manchineel oil. Never touch a leaf. There are some such trees in the Key Largo natural forest north of the town, which when last seen, were marked by a sharpyed ranger ( Nemetz?).
There are aloe snakes in the Everglades prairie, crossed and portaged by canoers, a 99-mile water and land route for the hearty, which joins Flamingo and Everglade City further west. Four of the 26 varieties are poisonous, two rattlesnake, a water moccasin and a small coral snake, most deadly. The Burmese python, introduced by kiddies who bought the cute snake and dumped it a few years later when it grew, now is destroying the native fauna, and not just rabbits. Ecologists re trying to find a harmless way to get rid of them, poisoning would affect the ecology. If you have ideas, call snakeman Jim Duquesnel (1-888-IVE-GOT1). If you want to see one, in Key Largo, on a cool morning they may crawl on to a quiet asphalt road that has retained last evening's warmth. Ask islanders how the pythons got across the Bay, and they shudder.
Next point to visit on a quick trip is a mile or two along 9336, past Flamingo is the famed Eco Pond, a huge tree in a pond, a natural roosting place for the night for all birds, safe from foxes and other predators who cannot get across the waterBest visit is at a late afternoon. Unfortunately, the tree was destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, and the area was covered by mud. Now it has recovered, the tree has shot up new branches and all will be well in another decade.
These are just highspots, there are some dozen more hammocks, trails and observation points along the 38 miles that will tease you, and then there is the Shark Valley Center along the Tamiami Trail, Rte 41, where a tram will take you through alligator territory, to avoid your stepping on any of the creatures and hurting each other. Send this article of Everglades highspots to your Miami friends, perhaps they‘d like to invest a day or two to visiting their park. It’s like visiting Central Park in NYC, so few of us do it. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
Wally Dobelis thanks NYTimes and internet sources and various tour guides
Tired of politics, New Yorkers give “If you don’t use it you lose it” advice to Florida: visit Everglades National Park
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Tired of politics, New Yorkers give “If you don’t use it you lose it” advice to Florida: visit Everglades National Park
As New Yorkers on vacation in South Florida, specifically in the Florida Keys, we are not into the Miami South Beach high life. We are not fishermen either, as our Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Canadian snowbird neighbors are (or were, in younger years). So, why the Keys, coral rock islands with few beaches, where big action is on Wednesdays, when the Key Largo public library stays open till 8 PM, facilitating snowbirds’ communications with the grandchildren. So, what's the secret?
Well, it’s not the fleshpots of Key West, or the gambling at the Indian Casino. It is Everglades National Park, one of the world's finest viewing arenas of water culture, change, destruction and recovery. But that's heavy, let me mention water birds, herons, giant white egrets, ibises, diving anhingas, being watched by alligators, snakes, walking mangroves overtaking waters, their floating seedpods that take roots whenever they touch bottom, airplants in tree branches, living on what floats by. Florida has no grand canyons ( except maybe the mountains of garbage) and might wash over as the icebergs melt and oceans expand (my dear friends the Midwestern climate change deniers notwithstanding). So, any New Yorkers vacationing in the greater Miami area are advised to drive down US1 to Homestead, turn west onto Route 9336 and go two miles until you see “Robert Is Here” fruit market, a destination, then turn left and a few miles later turn right following the brown sign, then travel past the rich Redlands tomato fields until the entrance to the Everglades National Park. If eligible, use your seniors' National Parks Pass, $10 at age 62, and good for admission of your carload of passengers, valid countrywide, and forever. In NYC’s Central Park, animal life was once more accessible. Now, visiting the Central Park Zoo costs up to $18/per person, for one-time visit.
Your first and best destination to the natural miracles of Everglades is just some five miles after the entrance, at Palm Court. It is the Anhinga Trail, a mile plus loop past the guest center, along a stream, the bank full of cormorants, big black fishing birds watching the creatures in the water, also you and the alligators who float right along the fish, looking for a meal, foul or aquarian. You are seeing all this interplay right before you for a long passage, interspersed with white egrets, green herons and small duck like purple gallinules, and an occasional turtle.
Departing from the walking path, a boardwalk carries you to the hammock even deeper.
At this point, let's explain that the entire Everglades is a fifty-mile wide slow-moving “River of Grass,” named ny naturalist Margaret Stoneham Douglas in her 1940s book. It flows over a flat prairie, with tree islands (hammocks) here and there. At least it was thus before the Army Corps of Engineers , between the World Wars, started to dig ditches and direct water traffic and destroy natural flow. Some of it has since been fixed.
Back to our walk, we see trees with long above ground roots, but they are not the red mangrove "walking men”, they are sweetwater apple, and they carry puffs and puffs of airplants, looking like little agaves, and known to hold small dollops of rainwater in their leaf hollows, essential for survival in the tropics and sometimes even helping out a thirsty wayfarer. In the trees roost anhingas, the diving waterbirds who have to dry heir wings in the sunlight, often above the nest, communicating in what I call "anhinga song," a monotonous tune that sounds like rusty wheels on a slow moving hay wagon. But it has its charms, particularly when you have viewed the bird diving and swimming underwater for distances, seeking to spear an unwary fish, even a thin gar, a swift mover. Then the anhinga surfaces, tosses the fish in the air and opens its beak, swallowing the critter whole.
The alligators are always there, providing the potential of drama, however brief, their catching and swallowing the prey is just a blur.
The anhinga trail is the most active and interesting of the Everglades wonders.
In spring the walkway is overrun by professio0nal photographers from nature publications and news media, quietly watching their targeted birds until they position themselves just right. These quiet paparazzi are often interest ting sources of bird identification and stories, having traveled through the parks throughout the country.
After the anhingas, take the 9336 path 30-plus miles south, to Flamingo, a small town and center of water trips, canoes at sunset into the bay, and motorboat tours into the canals the Army dug through the Everglades. One, a 1 3/4 tour for $25, takes you through the charming Buttonwood Canal to the Coot Lake, then via Tarpon Crek back to Buttonwood and Flamingo. At the start, you get to meet several American crocodiles, colored grey, with a slim head, who survive in the estuary, i.e. meeting point of sweet river and salty ocean water. The three mile canal, an ecological disaster when dug in 1957, has been closed off, to keep the downriver sweet water distributed inland, and to contain the onrushing ocean water that kills the native river fish. The mangroves which live in both waters, have been an economic boon, with their leaves in the water providing natural food and shelter for shrimp and other sea creatures, and helping the fishing industry.
Along the sides of the canal one can see the power of the mangroves, red, black and white, which need be cut back periodically lest they overwhelm the waterway and close it. In 1960, hurricane Donna did just that, ripping down hundreds of years’ growth of mangroves and demolishing their natural canopies over the canals. Since then, the growth has come back, with great power. Even orchids now grow in the canals, and park police must watch out for orchid poachers.
One of the nasty surprises in the mangrove jungle is a mangrove-like tree, but with drooping yellow-green leaves, seemingly suffering. It is the deadly manchineel tree, whose sap can eat through layers of skin and attack inner organs, The hardy Calusa Indians, original Florida inhabitants, now extinct due to disease and colonialist tactics, did away wit some of their Spanish conquistador men with arrows dipped in manchineel oil. Never touch a leaf. There are some such trees in the Key Largo natural forest north of the town, which when last seen, were marked by a sharpyed ranger ( Nemetz?).
There are aloe snakes in the Everglades prairie, crossed and portaged by canoers, a 99-mile water and land route for the hearty, which joins Flamingo and Everglade City further west. Four of the 26 varieties are poisonous, two rattlesnake, a water moccasin and a small coral snake, most deadly. The Burmese python, introduced by kiddies who bought the cute snake and dumped it a few years later when it grew, now is destroying the native fauna, and not just rabbits. Ecologists re trying to find a harmless way to get rid of them, poisoning would affect the ecology. If you have ideas, call snakeman Jim Duquesnel (1-888-IVE-GOT1). If you want to see one, in Key Largo, on a cool morning they may crawl on to a quiet asphalt road that has retained last evening's warmth. Ask islanders how the pythons got across the Bay, and they shudder.
Next point to visit on a quick trip is a mile or two along 9336, past Flamingo is the famed Eco Pond, a huge tree in a pond, a natural roosting place for the night for all birds, safe from foxes and other predators who cannot get across the waterBest visit is at a late afternoon. Unfortunately, the tree was destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, and the area was covered by mud. Now it has recovered, the tree has shot up new branches and all will be well in another decade.
These are just highspots, there are some dozen more hammocks, trails and observation points along the 38 miles that will tease you, and then there is the Shark Valley Center along the Tamiami Trail, Rte 41, where a tram will take you through alligator territory, to avoid your stepping on any of the creatures and hurting each other. Send this article of Everglades highspots to your Miami friends, perhaps they‘d like to invest a day or two to visiting their park. It’s like visiting Central Park in NYC, so few of us do it. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
Tired of politics, New Yorkers give “If you don’t use it you lose it” advice to Florida: visit Everglades National Park
As New Yorkers on vacation in South Florida, specifically in the Florida Keys, we are not into the Miami South Beach high life. We are not fishermen either, as our Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Canadian snowbird neighbors are (or were, in younger years). So, why the Keys, coral rock islands with few beaches, where big action is on Wednesdays, when the Key Largo public library stays open till 8 PM, facilitating snowbirds’ communications with the grandchildren. So, what's the secret?
Well, it’s not the fleshpots of Key West, or the gambling at the Indian Casino. It is Everglades National Park, one of the world's finest viewing arenas of water culture, change, destruction and recovery. But that's heavy, let me mention water birds, herons, giant white egrets, ibises, diving anhingas, being watched by alligators, snakes, walking mangroves overtaking waters, their floating seedpods that take roots whenever they touch bottom, airplants in tree branches, living on what floats by. Florida has no grand canyons ( except maybe the mountains of garbage) and might wash over as the icebergs melt and oceans expand (my dear friends the Midwestern climate change deniers notwithstanding). So, any New Yorkers vacationing in the greater Miami area are advised to drive down US1 to Homestead, turn west onto Route 9336 and go two miles until you see “Robert Is Here” fruit market, a destination, then turn left and a few miles later turn right following the brown sign, then travel past the rich Redlands tomato fields until the entrance to the Everglades National Park. If eligible, use your seniors' National Parks Pass, $10 at age 62, and good for admission of your carload of passengers, valid countrywide, and forever. In NYC’s Central Park, animal life was once more accessible. Now, visiting the Central Park Zoo costs up to $18/per person, for one-time visit.
Your first and best destination to the natural miracles of Everglades is just some five miles after the entrance, at Palm Court. It is the Anhinga Trail, a mile plus loop past the guest center, along a stream, the bank full of cormorants, big black fishing birds watching the creatures in the water, also you and the alligators who float right along the fish, looking for a meal, foul or aquarian. You are seeing all this interplay right before you for a long passage, interspersed with white egrets, green herons and small duck like purple gallinules, and an occasional turtle.
Departing from the walking path, a boardwalk carries you to the hammock even deeper.
At this point, let's explain that the entire Everglades is a fifty-mile wide slow-moving “River of Grass,” named ny naturalist Margaret Stoneham Douglas in her 1940s book. It flows over a flat prairie, with tree islands (hammocks) here and there. At least it was thus before the Army Corps of Engineers , between the World Wars, started to dig ditches and direct water traffic and destroy natural flow. Some of it has since been fixed.
Back to our walk, we see trees with long above ground roots, but they are not the red mangrove "walking men”, they are sweetwater apple, and they carry puffs and puffs of airplants, looking like little agaves, and known to hold small dollops of rainwater in their leaf hollows, essential for survival in the tropics and sometimes even helping out a thirsty wayfarer. In the trees roost anhingas, the diving waterbirds who have to dry heir wings in the sunlight, often above the nest, communicating in what I call "anhinga song," a monotonous tune that sounds like rusty wheels on a slow moving hay wagon. But it has its charms, particularly when you have viewed the bird diving and swimming underwater for distances, seeking to spear an unwary fish, even a thin gar, a swift mover. Then the anhinga surfaces, tosses the fish in the air and opens its beak, swallowing the critter whole.
The alligators are always there, providing the potential of drama, however brief, their catching and swallowing the prey is just a blur.
The anhinga trail is the most active and interesting of the Everglades wonders.
In spring the walkway is overrun by professio0nal photographers from nature publications and news media, quietly watching their targeted birds until they position themselves just right. These quiet paparazzi are often interest ting sources of bird identification and stories, having traveled through the parks throughout the country.
After the anhingas, take the 9336 path 30-plus miles south, to Flamingo, a small town and center of water trips, canoes at sunset into the bay, and motorboat tours into the canals the Army dug through the Everglades. One, a 1 3/4 tour for $25, takes you through the charming Buttonwood Canal to the Coot Lake, then via Tarpon Crek back to Buttonwood and Flamingo. At the start, you get to meet several American crocodiles, colored grey, with a slim head, who survive in the estuary, i.e. meeting point of sweet river and salty ocean water. The three mile canal, an ecological disaster when dug in 1957, has been closed off, to keep the downriver sweet water distributed inland, and to contain the onrushing ocean water that kills the native river fish. The mangroves which live in both waters, have been an economic boon, with their leaves in the water providing natural food and shelter for shrimp and other sea creatures, and helping the fishing industry.
Along the sides of the canal one can see the power of the mangroves, red, black and white, which need be cut back periodically lest they overwhelm the waterway and close it. In 1960, hurricane Donna did just that, ripping down hundreds of years’ growth of mangroves and demolishing their natural canopies over the canals. Since then, the growth has come back, with great power. Even orchids now grow in the canals, and park police must watch out for orchid poachers.
One of the nasty surprises in the mangrove jungle is a mangrove-like tree, but with drooping yellow-green leaves, seemingly suffering. It is the deadly manchineel tree, whose sap can eat through layers of skin and attack inner organs, The hardy Calusa Indians, original Florida inhabitants, now extinct due to disease and colonialist tactics, did away wit some of their Spanish conquistador men with arrows dipped in manchineel oil. Never touch a leaf. There are some such trees in the Key Largo natural forest north of the town, which when last seen, were marked by a sharpyed ranger ( Nemetz?).
There are aloe snakes in the Everglades prairie, crossed and portaged by canoers, a 99-mile water and land route for the hearty, which joins Flamingo and Everglade City further west. Four of the 26 varieties are poisonous, two rattlesnake, a water moccasin and a small coral snake, most deadly. The Burmese python, introduced by kiddies who bought the cute snake and dumped it a few years later when it grew, now is destroying the native fauna, and not just rabbits. Ecologists re trying to find a harmless way to get rid of them, poisoning would affect the ecology. If you have ideas, call snakeman Jim Duquesnel (1-888-IVE-GOT1). If you want to see one, in Key Largo, on a cool morning they may crawl on to a quiet asphalt road that has retained last evening's warmth. Ask islanders how the pythons got across the Bay, and they shudder.
Next point to visit on a quick trip is a mile or two along 9336, past Flamingo is the famed Eco Pond, a huge tree in a pond, a natural roosting place for the night for all birds, safe from foxes and other predators who cannot get across the waterBest visit is at a late afternoon. Unfortunately, the tree was destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, and the area was covered by mud. Now it has recovered, the tree has shot up new branches and all will be well in another decade.
These are just highspots, there are some dozen more hammocks, trails and observation points along the 38 miles that will tease you, and then there is the Shark Valley Center along the Tamiami Trail, Rte 41, where a tram will take you through alligator territory, to avoid your stepping on any of the creatures and hurting each other. Send this article of Everglades highspots to your Miami friends, perhaps they‘d like to invest a day or two to visiting their park. It’s like visiting Central Park in NYC, so few of us do it. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
Thursday, March 08, 2012
In search of personal integrity among politicians
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The life of President Obama is more pain than joy, no matter how cheerful he tries to be at the White House Blues and Rock Concert. The world has radically changed in the 21st Century, and so has our social compact, the rules of the road, if you will. We accept piracy, and negotiate and pay ransom, where in the past nations would have gotten together and blasted the stuffing out of the Somalian criminals, treating them like bandits at the crossroads, and made them behave. Drug lords run Guatemala, Honduras , El Salvador and parts of Mexico, with a murder rate up to 81 persons per year, and governments are intimidated. Afghanistan, where we tried to install democracy is slowly taken back by the suppressors of women and the drug growers, who kill our exasperated soldiers and rally the entire Moslem environment against the us, claiming book burning today, the world tomorrow. The hopeful Arab Spring is being been taken over by the mirror images of the tyrants we hoped would be eradicated by newborn democracies. And nuclear wannabes in North Korea exact ransom, and in Iran hold us up, and even if were to believe their claims of peaceful atomic energy, the Ayatollah steps forward and declares that another country, just trying to exist, is a land and people to be eradicated. Even the Hamas, for a decade in Damascus, leaves Syria and refuses to support the Assad minority government and his Allawi tribe trying to stop Syrian Spring with indiscriminate mass murder.
What to do? Our President tries for peaceful solutions, quiet diplomacy, using a balance of power and such Mideast rulers who go with the US. For this he gets blasted by the GOP political candidates, right here in the US, who think him chicken, and deem a Rooseveltian “speak quietly and carry a big stick” policy a surrender, and an act of weakness. These are among the same 10 plus candidates whose campaign actions and interactions , particularly since January 2012, have revealed some of them to be smooth tongued liars , people one would not trust to do any business with, much less entrust the nation’s and the world’s future. Some of them have revealed their sanctimoniousness to be cover towards imposing rules over our personal lives, suspect of willing to violate women’s rights and abrogating the Constitution that they so seriously claim to defend, under the guise of protecting choice of freedoms of choice of faith. Sellout to special interests, glibness and barefaced twisting of answers, downright lying and sheer ignorance, lack of smarts and inability to reason are some of the qualities evident among the self-appointed candidates who ask us to trust them. This has turned us callous, or have made us ask for candidates with some reliable overwhelming principles, such as a sincere code of religious morality. That is a truly, truly dangerous thing. And then comes the biased law: the Supreme Court produces its Citizens United decision that permits corporations and billionaires elect Presidents. It may happen as we watch, Even the President has joined in, to even out the election funds balance, and not be left behind.
Speaking of lying, there are the sneaky cheats who write deliberate concoctions of untruths, hiding their names and pretending to be of the Administration, with their plausible concoctions chain-distributed by e-mail to friends and fellow haters.
Illustratively, an article, Wall Street Journal Sizes Up Obama, by Eddie Sessions, from WSJ (a phony attribution), produces a biography of a plausible character, an attractive student of interesting background whose Dreams of My Father (1995) is alleged to be written by Bill Ayers, a Communist with a small c, and whose leftist friends, classmates, professors and colleagues , and the Chicago Daley machine pushed him into state legislature, US Congress, to the 2004 keynote speech Then the story becomes scurrilous, going into birthism arguments, Obama’s communist ideas, his denials of serious threats at Ft. Hood and from the Christmas Bomber, and from terrorist suspects released from Guantanamo , and accuses him of being a sock puppet for his handlers, a ventriloquist’s dummy. Easy googling reveals that the author is an Alan Caruba, a PR pro for right-wing causes since the 1970s, writing in the WSJAnnex, a blog, pretending to be a WSJ editor.
Another message to the faithful, no title nor author , warns the reader of HR4646, sponsored by the President’s financial team, that will add 1% transaction fee to all bank transactions, including Social Security deposits, purchases of al goods, real estate, stocks, trades,. It is alleged to be sponsored by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR)and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IO), with approving comments by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), using artfully selected quotes of the rumor in SSwopes.com , arranging the exposure text as real. Reading further, you find that this bill has been introduced by a far out leftwing Rep Chaka Fattah every session since 2005 as the Debt Free America Act, and has died, without any supporting sponsor, in committee, The authorship has been vigorously denied by DeFazio and Harkin, who in 2009 sponsored a value added tax on stock, bond, futures and similar transactions, HR4191, Let Wall Street Pay For Main Street, not approved by the administration, which also died in committee.
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How to get back to normal, in the US? It will, not to worry. To cure the Citizens United decision, it would take amendments to the Constitution, a log term task, For a trustworthy Presidential GOP candidate, can the frequently position-shifting Gov. Mitt Romney reestablish himself, obviating a need for a negotiated Presidential candidate in Tampa in August? As to the world, a second-term president, experienced and smart, and fearless of failing the subsequent election, could be effective. That would neutralize the liars, and make for cleaner politics. Maybe. As for the GOP, to reestablish credibility, it would have to develop better signature requirements to admit people of character to the candidacy in primaries, a NRC task. The US will get back to trusting the politicians when the GOP stops selfish power-hungry road-blocks and returns to the standards, if not Lincoln and Roosevelt, at least those of Reagan, who knew how to cooperate, in the interests of the Union.
