Everglades National Park holds a landscape of diverse and wonderful settings/NPS file, Caitlin Rivas
Before I came to the Florida Everglades, I imagined only a province of swamps and sawgrass—a watery place, nearly submerged. So I am surprised to be crunching along a trail deep in a dry landscape that, to my untrained eye, resembles something like the Serengeti Plain. As far as I can see, an open field of shrubs and grasses is studded with towering slash pines that stand apart from each other, perforating the blue sky. Each tree makes its own impression in this open forest, no two of them the same, like fingerprints. I bend down to touch the trail itself and am surprised to find that it’s mostly rock—pockmarked limestone, to be exact. On this warm March day, it’s dry as dust, powdering my fingers and shoes.
This is the pine rocklands, one of the rarest and most diverse habitats in Everglades National Park, and indeed in all of south Florida. Beyond the swamps and pinelands, the Everglades also contains open rivers and bays, mangrove channels, cypress strands, and hardwood hammocks. It was this landscape that Marjory Stoneman Douglas advocated for in her famous book The Everglades: River of Grass—a land wild and mysterious and, above all, wet, a realm of toothy reptiles and long-beaked birds. Here, water sheets across the 18,000-square-mile Greater Everglades Ecosystem, stretching from the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee to the north, through Big Cypress National Preserve, and into this national park on its way to the Florida Bay.
“The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water,” Douglas wrote, “slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades.”
Intrigued, I’ve come here with National Parks Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek, to experience the park and to bear witness to how it is dealing with its past, present, and future. Standing at the Miami Airport waiting for Kurt to pick me up, it was difficult to imagine that, in the late 19th century, the city of Miami was barely more than an idea, incorporating in 1896 with just 344 people.
Today, the Miami metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the nation, with a population of 6.1 million. In just over a century, the landscape of south Florida changed dramatically, and the Everglades changed along with it. In the early decades of the 1900s, and even after the park’s creation in 1947, these wetlands were channeled, drained, dammed, and leveed in the name of flood control, the better to serve the state’s growing population.
Over the years, invasive plant and animal species have taken advantage of the altered ecosystem as well, overrunning this landscape’s native flora and fauna. Burmese pythons, melaleuca trees, Nile monitor lizards, monk parakeets, and lionfish are among the invasive species that have taken hold in Everglades. The big snakes in many areas have decimated small mammal populations.
In addition to the pythons, nonnative lizards go after native species, and fish pose threats to native species as well as coral reefs. Invasive flora and fauna compete with native species, potentially remaking the park's landscape in ways that would reverberate through the many endemic organisms that depend upon it.
Melaleuca is a subtropical tree native to Australia, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands that arrived in south Florida in the early 1900s for, the Park Service says, “swamp drying.” Unfortunately, the tree spreads quickly, pushes out native species such as sawgrass, and is a risk to the park’s marshes, wet prairies, and aquatic sloughs.
With this history on our minds, our journey into the park begins, fittingly, on the water. After a long drive in on the park road, we have arrived in Flamingo, the visitor use area on the park’s southern tip. There, we board a motorboat that will take us into the park’s interior via the Buttonwood Canal, a manmade waterway that dates to 1922. The canal is named for the buttonwood tree, a gnarled mangrove shrub that lines the canal along with other native plants and trees. Our tour purveyor, Flamingo Adventures, has promised us that we’ll see native Florida wildlife, and we’ve barely pushed back from the dock when they make good on that promise—or maybe I should say that the park makes good on it. Lounging in the sun on the edge of the canal is a crocodile, which we can discern by the V-shape of its snout and its grayish color.
South Florida, our boat guide tells us, is the only place in the United States where both of our native crocodilian species coexist—the American crocodile and the American alligator. As we push farther inland, we see the latter, an alligator, its body almost completely submerged except for its wary dark eyes. When the boat gets closer, the gator turns without so much as a splash and swims away. We soon spot other alligators on rocks and logs, sometimes holding their jaws open (a means of regulating their body temperatures, much like a dog panting). It’s easy to differentiate them from crocodiles by their black color and U-shaped snout. Both species, the alligator and crocodile, are federally listed as threatened, among the more than 40 federally listed endangered and threatened species in the park.
Moving farther down the canal, we are treated to the sight of numerous birds. In all, more than 360 bird species have been identified in Everglades National Park, including wading birds, land birds, and birds of prey. In the 19th century, naturalist John James Audubon wrote of the Everglades, “We observed great flocks of wading birds flying overhead toward their evening roosts…They appeared in such numbers to actually block out the light from the sun." That density is hard to imagine now, given overall declines in wading bird populations over the last century, but we still spot roseate spoonbills, ibises, and herons flying overhead, egrets wading, and even an osprey nest.
As we pass by, one anhinga sits on the shoreline, its glossy black-green wings outstretched. Anhingas do this for thermal regulation, almost always turning their backs to the sun, and they angle themselves perpendicularly to the sun’s position (meaning they flatten out when it’s higher and stand taller when it’s lower). To me, the anhinga looks like an ancient Egyptian goddess come to life.
Before we leave this part of the park, we tour the Flamingo Visitor Center, now undergoing a complete rehabilitation, as well as the area’s new Eco-Tents, a comfy addition to the park’s traditional tent and RV campgrounds. Situated along a boardwalk so they’re elevated from the ground, the Eco-Tents feature beds, nightstands, and chairs, as well as unparalleled views of Florida Bay. It’s tempting to linger here, but we have another place to be.
With the mercury ascending above 90 degrees, we’re soon standing at a trailhead at Long Pine Key, where we’ve met up with Melissa Abdo, the Sun Coast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association. Abdo holds a doctorate in biology, and she’s our guide into the pine rocklands. As we hike, Abdo points out various plant species, including sedges and scrub palmettos, and depressions in the ground called solution holes. Limestone is porous and given to a pocked, moon-like appearance. Solution holes are larger dissolved areas that are important microcosmic habitats, Abdo explains.
“This is a globally imperiled ecosystem,” Abdo says of the pine rocklands. “It’s only found in south Florida and the Bahamas, and Everglades has the largest remnant of this ecosystem. One of the things that makes this habitat so ecologically unique is that it has an abundance of floristic diversity—that’s the plant diversity—down low. There are a number of endemic plant species that are only found in the pine rocklands of south Florida.”
As we crunch deeper into the open forest, she tells us about her work both advocating for and assisting with the implementation of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, a framework of more than 60 hydrology improvement projects that Congress authorized in 2000. Unfortunately, funding for the CERP has been inconsistent, but recently, the state of Florida has committed $400 million, and Congress $200 million, to implement restoration projects. One such project is the bridging of the Tamiami Trail, the portion of U.S. 41 that connects Tampa and Miami and has long interrupted the flow of water through the Everglades. A one-mile section of bridge was completed in 2013, and a second, 2.6-mile bridge is to be completed in 2022.
We continue hiking through the rocklands when Abdo suddenly stops, looking around. “Let’s head there,” she says, taking a 90-degree turn off the main trail towards a thick knot of trees. With south Florida sweat trickling down my neck, I’m grateful to head for anything with shade, and we eagerly follow. This is a hardwood hammock, Abdo explains, another ecologically distinct and important habitat in the Everglades. Hardwood hammocks are stands of broad-leafed trees that grow on natural rises, usually just a few inches higher than surrounding areas, but high and dry enough to support a distinct mix of species. Here are temperate trees you find elsewhere in the United States, like live oaks and maples, coexisting with tropical trees with colorful names like gumbo limbo and cocoplum.
Stepping from the open shrubbery into the hammock feels like quantum-leaping from a desert into a jungle. As we pause for a drink of water, Abdo pinches off a stem from a smilax plant, also known as greenbrier. “Taste it,” she instructs. “It tastes like asparagus.” I do, and she’s right. It’s not surprising to learn that the indigenous people who once lived in south Florida were drawn to the hardwood hammocks for their settlements.
“We hope that by restoring the waterflows, we will see ecosystem-wide benefits,” Abdo says. “We want every single species in the Everglades to benefit.”
As we head back to the trailhead, I turn and take a last look at these pine rocklands, this American savanna amid the river of grass. I am happy to know it better, but part of me appreciates that it remains somewhat mysterious, too. As Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote, the Everglades can never be wholly known.
Comments
Very interesting article about a fasinating place