All Mr. Philena wants for Christmas is an alligator*

[philena]

Traditionally, my family gathers in Florida with my paternal grandparents for Christmas. This would have been the first year I took Mr. Philena with me, but he, being who he is, thought that it was foolish to be so close to a national park without taking a peek at it, so we left a few days early to go to the Everglades! The whole way there, he was talking about alligators: this is how big they get, this is where you find them, here's a story about someone who saw one, this is what they look like, this is what you should do if you fall in the water when there are alligators around, but we shouldn't get our hopes up, he said, because then we'll be disappointed if we don't see one. But it was clear he was getting his hopes up, and all he wanted was to see just one alligator. Just one, and he'd be happy. That's all he wanted for Christmas.



The first night we spent in an airport hotel, where we did not see any alligators, but we did see a family of five raccoons outside our room. I mentioned this delightedly to the manager who checked us out the next morning, but he was not happy to hear about raccoons. Especially not five of them. Then we picked up a rental car and started driving along the highway that led to Everglades City, straight through Big Cypress National Preserve. The road was lined most of the way by canals, which were FULL of wildlife. We saw the following birdies:

Greater egrets


Snowy egrets


White ibises


Wood storks


Roseate spoonbills


Great blue herons


And anhingas! For quite a while we thought they were varieties of cormorants:


but then we asked a person at the visitors' center, and learned that they were different birds. The males are the ones that are most similar to cormorants, although they have more white-patterned plumage:



but it was the females who were remarkable, with the smooth brown neck that contrasted so sharply with the black body:



For a while I sat there looking at the birdies while Daniel drove, and then I thought I saw an alligator! So I made him stop the car, and we got out and strolled to the side of the road, and there was an alligator! It was a teeny, teeny little thing--perhaps only two or two and a half feet long, and I was amazed that I had seen it from a moving car. I mentioned this to Daniel, so we went along some more, and there was another gator! It was a bit bigger--maybe four or five feet long--, but it wasn't facing the same way that I thought the gator I had seen had been facing. You see where this is going: we ended up seeing four gators in a 100-yard walk, all by the side of the road, all of varying sizes, and as we drove along I saw more and more and more of them. Eventually we lost count, but we didn't lose interest in them! They are magnificent animals, dozing placidly in the sun or in the water, with their nice smiles and snaggly teeth. Daniel only wanted to see one, but we saw dozens! Some were up to 10 feet long, some were less than a foot, but they were all cute.



Eventually we got to the Big Cypress visitors' center (remember--so far we have seen all this from the car), where there were easily ten alligators in the little channel next to a boardwalk, which we greeted before going inside and learning about hiking trails, including the Florida trail, which was mostly underwater. That didn't deter us, though: we discovered that my boots are mainly waterproof, while Daniel's are not, and we saw flocks and flocks of egrets and ibises two kinds of butterflies (that we could easily identify):

Zebra longwing


and Queen butterfly


There were no gators, but then the water was never really deep enough for them to be comfortable. At the most it would have come up to mid-calf length, which is not quite enough for swimming, although it was plenty to soak up our pants and boots and make the rental car smell really interesting for the next five days.

I was most struck by the fact that this area of Florida, which I had always imagined to be full of shady rainforesty plant life over watery footing, was so open. It was like a grassy prairie, with very few trees or shade of any kind, and lots of brown grasses growing up out of slodgy mud. A few hammocks of trees were growing up in tiny groves, but they were pine trees, not mangroves. It was a little disappointing at first, but all the flocks of ibises and egrets were much more visible this way, and they were beautiful enough to overcome any disappointment.

Then we went to Everglades City, where the next day we took a guided kayak tour of the Turner river. We saw many many more of the same birds as before, and some alligators, and wove through a cypress slough:


At the other end of the slough, the guide stopped us and pointed out a barred owl, which was roosting in a pond apple tree** above us:


It turned its head around 180 degrees a few times while we talked about the place, but didn't fly away, and seemed happy to snooze contentedly while we awkwardly maneuvered our kayaks close enough to the guide so we could see what he was showing us. Bromeliads were everywhere, growing on the tree trunks:


And so were orchids. In the cypress slough, we saw quite a few clamshell orchids, sharing tree-trunk space with the bromeliads and the owl:


Then we turned around and went the other way on the Turner river, which brought us to a genuine mangrove tunnel, exactly as I had always imagined the Everglades.


There we saw more gators--some of them quite close to us, because the channel was so narrow that there was no way around them except right past them six feet away. We also saw night-scented orchids:


And a turtle:


The end!




*We did not bring our digital camera with us, so these are all pictures found through google images, which are representative of what we saw.

**The pond apples produced by the pond apple tree, our guide told us, are edible. But we should not try eating them until we've been lost in the swamps for a few days. Apparently they do not taste good.

Comments

[philena.livejournal.com]

I hear you about the crickets! They weren't as plentiful as you describe, but I got a three-inch-long bright green one on my hand when I put my hand too close to the grass by the waterway. I shrieked and shook it off, but now that I think about it, it was harmless and beautiful, and I'm a bit abashed at having been so wigged out.