Double click on any image to see a high-resolution slide show of all photos.
 |
| black-bellied whistling duck |
 |
| purple gallinule |
 |
| Florida softshell turtle |
Then off to Homestead, a small agricultural town with lots of its own strip malls, close to the main Everglades entrance, the road to Flamingo. For nearly fifty years there was a gorgeous lodge inside the park, where Russ stayed in 1979, but Hurricane Wilma destroyed it in 2005 and it was never rebuilt, probably a good thing. Our cheap hotel had two beds and a little kitchen area where we made lunches (and some dinners) for our four nights there. In the middle of nowhere we found a fruit stand/hopping nightlife joint called Robert is Here, where Nina enjoyed their famous guanabana milkshake.
We spent one day at Shark Valley Slough, where we took a knee-deep-in-the-saw-grass-prairie "swamp hike" with a ranger. Here and there are small slightly raised areas with dry dirt, where trees have managed to grow. Depending on the type of tree, they are called pine keys or mahogany hammocks or bay heads or cypress domes. Whole communities of Seminole and Miccosukee lived in these "tree islands" after the native people were forced south in the mid-1800's by white settlers, to live where nobody else wanted to live. Everglades National Park is amazing - it is open 24 hours a day and you are allowed to go anywhere anytime - off trail, midnight walk, paddle, bushwhack. Such a contrast to Galapagos National Park where you arrive only on foot and stay on the path for a short amount of time. Nina waded through the slough in my new "nerd pants" (zip-off Jane Goodall style pants) held up with Russ's belt, because it turns out she had left most of her clothing at the West Palm Beach Hotel. Oops.
We bicycled many miles along the creek though we had to get off our bikes about every two yards to admire another alligator or wood stork, anhinga or great egret, tricolored heron or limkin. Amazing! They were so close and numerous Russ turned in his bike and went on foot with his camera.
 |
| yawning wood stork |
That evening, Russ's birthday, we changed out of our swamp/biking clothes (in the car) and drove into suburban Miami, to a gigantic crazy crowded mall, for a wonderful dinner with Robert and Myrna. Myrna hadn't seen Nina since she was about five so there was some catching up to do.
 |
| Nina's new friends |
 |
|
this handsome beak can inflict damage on your car
|
 |
| American alligator |
At the Flamingo Visitor Center on Florida Bay, between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, we saw white pelicans and black skimmers, but no flamingos. We spotted manatees close up in the harbor but they surface for about one second every few minutes so you don't see much. Also a lone crocodile sleeping in the sun.
 |
| we forget how big pelicans are, his buddy is a double-crested cormorant |
 |
| American crocodile |
Alligators are numerous and live in the fresh water marshes, swamps, rivers and lakes of every county in Florida. Crocodiles are endangered, and live in salt or brackish water of mangrove swamps only in south Florida. We spent one day canoeing in the mangroves, among cocoplum and buttonwood trees, bromeliads and bladderwort.
 |
| white ibis |
We delivered Russ back to West Palm Beach for his flight home, and after retrieving a giant garbage bag full of Nina's clothes from her hotel, Nina and I headed west to La Belle, for a morning of birding guided by a local expert the next day. We saw reddish egrets and roseate spoonbills at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island and tropical hawks and migrating plovers at Bunche Beach. Had BLFGT's (BLT's with fried green tomatoes) and chocolate cream pie at the Two Peas Cafe.
 |
| reddish egret |
 |
| roseate spoonbill doing an arabesque? |
On the driveway leaving our hotel in La Belle we found a family of northern bobwhites, a singing eastern meadowlark and a loggerhead shrike guarding his stash of at least three frogs he had impaled on the barbed wire fence within twenty yards of where we found him.
Then off to Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, possibly our favorite birding spot of all. A long gorgeous boardwalk winds through woods and swamp where we saw a white-eyed vireo, black-throated green warbler, blue-gray gnatcatchers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers. We didn't know when the sanctuary closed, and at dusk the ranger pedaled his bike out to find us and escort us back to the locked up visitor center. Our drive south had many "panther crossing" signs and three elevated stretches of highway where a Florida panther underpass has been built to decrease road kill of this endangered subspecies of cougar.
 |
| female anhinga drying her wings |
We spent two nights at the Everglades Gulf Coast entrance, in Everglades City, a tiny charming town a few blocks long. We took a ranger guided mangrove canoe paddle, and motor boat tour of the Thousand Islands, watching a couple of Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins frolic along our boat's wake for half an hour. We saw royal terns, white ibis, laughing gulls, brown pelicans, and near the parking lot, a great-crested flycatcher. Our first night we strolled off to find dinner and the town was deserted, not a soul anywhere except leeches on the sidewalks. We finally rounded a bend and found the Camellia Street Grill, an energized hopping tropical eatery filled with noisy people sitting inside and out. We ate there both nights, amazing fish tacos, catfish and grits, crab cakes and oysters.
We spent our last day exploring the Big Cypress Bend Boardwalk in Fakahatchee Strand, made famous by the book The Orchid Thief and the movie Adaptation. Saw great-horned owls and boat-tailed grackles and beautiful swamp lilies, but no rare ghost orchids.
Our last hike was Kirby Storter boardwalk in Big Cypress National Preserve. Big Cypress is continuous habitat with the Everglades but the Tamiami (Tampa to Miami) Highway built in 1928 separates them. Roads and development are allowed in Big Cypress, mostly as part of the permanent settlement rights of the Miccosukee and Seminole, but the watershed is essential to the Everglades.
 |
| tricolored heron |
At the end of the boardwalk we stood surrounded by pileated and red-bellied woodpeckers chasing each other high in the giant bald cypress trees, two green heron hunting just below us, a great egret fishing, an anhinga hunting from a tree, palm warblers and eastern phoebes catching bugs, baby alligators dozing, a white tailed deer browsing and a red-shouldered hawk supervising everything from above. So peaceful!
 |
| green heron hunting |
Our last Florida meal was barbecue at The Pit, recommended by Robert, on the Tamiami Trail. You can read Nina's blog posts about our trip here, though I'm anxiously awaiting one about the BIRDS!
http://ninafinley176.blogspot.com/
We flew home from West Palm Beach the next day, and I thought birding in Seattle would never be fun again. Luckily, that is not so, and I am excited once again to find a ruby-crowned kinglet or yellow-rumped warbler at the Montlake Fill.
