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.
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.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 6:50 PM 
