From 1967 to 1969, there was a show on evening television called “Gentle Ben” about a little boy, his pet bear (named Ben), and his father, the park ranger. The story took place in the Florida Everglades and the father routinely drove an airboat for work. Since that time, I had wanted to see the Everglades and ride an air boat. My next stop would accomplish both of those. I was staying in the Midway Campground of the Big Cypress Preserve. The Cypress Preserve is on the north side of the of the area while the Everglades lies around the Big Cypress Preserve to the South. I was halfway between Homestead and Everglades City on Highway 90. The aquatic bird life was amazing. I saw egrets, herons, pelicans, gulls, spoonbills, and ibis. I drove the swamp section of this road more than a few times and every time, I stopped to take pictures of what I thought was going to be the best bird picture I would take it.
The day after getting there, I went for my airboat ride. We went through the Everglades with low hanging trees, high water, tall grasses and all sorts of marine life all around us. We saw plenty of gators, a few turtles, a couple of mule deer and no pythons.
Let me pause for a minute to talk about invasive species. For the longest time we did not know what we did not know, and we were not environmentally savvy enough to make smart decisions. As a result, we introduced invasive species with the idea that they would somehow solve a problem that we were having. Eventually they became the problem. One needs to look no further than the southeast part of the United States with Kudzu to understand what that means. First brought to this country from Japan as a ground cover for the Department of Transportation on Interstate highway construction projects of the 60s, it is now literally eating the South.
That was an unintended consequence that we weren’t smart enough to avoid but then we also have the careless consequences because we don’t care enough to avoid them. Overpopulation of pythons in the Everglades is one such issue. The python has no known predators and is rapidly consuming small game that typically would be food for the gators which belong in the Everglades. They are also consuming aquatic life that have no defenses against them. There are several stories as to how these were released in the everglades. Some of them apparently were released because people bought them as pets on their Florida vacation and when they got too big to manage in their aquarium, they got released into the everglades. The other probably more plausible answer for the over proliferation of these reptiles is that the one of the primary places that sold these was in Miami and during one of the hurricane Andrew, their building got wiped out. All of the snakes found their way into the Everglades as their preferable home. These pythons lay between 50 – 100 eggs per season. The population has gotten way out of control. There is now a bounty on every python that is brought in killed by a hunter (you have to get a license and there are several people know to just be making a living hunting python.) The hunters are paid hourly, and they get $50 bucks for a 4-foot python and $25 per foot for every foot over that. Some of these snakes can grow to 20 feet long. Just like we need to stop littering and be smart with our consumption of natural resources, we also need to be mindful of invasive species. If it didn’t grow here naturally, we just shouldn’t bring it here. Our ecosystem is balanced until we muck with it.
My next trip was a jet boat trip almost out to the Gulf in the deeper waters of the Everglades and into the area where the water becomes salt water instead of freshwater. Here I got what was certainly the shot of the month and maybe the shot of the year or the or the trip. The dolphins had been playing all around our boat in twos, threes and fives and I took many pictures of them under the water. A good captain said to the driver, ” hey let’s pick up some speed and see if they don’t play in our wake.” I was listening so with that announcement; I leaned over the edge of the boat with my camera poised to see what would happen. Flipper or whatever his name is played right into the captain’s hand, jumping along beside our vessel.
Later that day, I went to a theater show here I got to get my picture taken with the baby gator. It was it wasn’t cuddly and while I don’t usually do selfies I thought this would was worth the effort.
So I thought the Everglades was just a very large swamp. It is not, the Everglades is technically a very slow-moving, shallow river dominated by sawgrass and marsh. The Big Cypress Swamp is truly just a swamp. The everglades are more than that.
Couple days later I got the opportunity to go to the visitor center of the National Park and take a trolley tour around some of the areas that could be seen from a paved road. Here I got very up close and personal with a gator. He was very close to our open trolley. We were told not to worry that it was wintertime, and they are cold-blooded and so they moved very slow, and we could outrun them. It was at this point I replied quietly, “but you’ve never seen me run.” The folks around me got a good kick out of that comment.
