Discovering the Everglades

January is a great time to visit the Everglades.  It offers a welcome relief from the cold and it is a beautiful place to spend a few weeks with a camera.  I have been visiting the glades in winter for the past three years but I am only beginning to understand the nature of this unique place. 

Contrary to my uninformed belief, the Everglades is a very wide, shallow, slow moving river, not really a swamp.  The word "swamp" brings up images of dark water, mud, quicksand, snakes, alligators, and all types of menacing creatures lurking in the water and ready to spring out and eat you.  In fact, the Everglades water is crystal clear and it rests on a slab of limestone.  A walk through the sawgrass of the glades reveals that the water is knee deep and the bottom is firm with a thin layer of plant material covering the bare rock.  Yes, there are snakes, alligators and thousands of birds but you are in more danger driving to the Everglades than you are in walking through the sawgrass and cypress domes.

The sawgrass prairies are a unique and beautiful place.  The Cypress trees look dead but in fact they are dormant during the winter months.  In spring they will grow new leaves.  They also look small and young but many are 100 years old.  The Everglades is a nutrient deprived environment so life is very difficult there.  These trees struggle to survive, rooted in only a few inches of decaying plant material.

A few inches of change in elevation makes a great difference in the habitat.  In places where there are depressions in the limestone floor the water is deeper.  Cypress trees growing in these depressions get more nutrients and can grow taller creating Cypress domes.  These domes are easily recognized because the trees on the outer edges are short and the trees get taller toward the center or deeper part of the domes.  During the dry season, winter, these domes become the last refuse for wildlife as shallower areas begin to dry up.

Walking through the sawgrass and entering a Cypress dome opens up a whole new world.  Even in winter there is an abundance of both animal and plant life.  The trees are filled with Bromelids and many varieties of air plants and orchids.  They are not in bloom in winter but they are still colorful and they provide homes for many small creatures and a food source for birds and other wild animals.

This Red-Bellied Woodpecker was working hard to find insects and lizards that make the air plants home.  I watched him work for 20 minutes and he was very well rewarded for his efforts.

I was lucky enough to see many varieties of birds including owls and hawks in my visits to the Cypress domes.  As the water goes down, alligators move into the domes and build nests in the center or deepest part of the dome.  During my visits the gators were just starting to move in and I saw two that were staking out territory for the upcoming dry season.  We mutually decided to leave each other alone.





The Cypress domes themselves are reason enough to visit the glades.  I leave you with a few images of the interior or the domes. 

The domes are great in winter but I want to return when the orchids are in bloom.  July is prime season for the orchid bloom.  I wonder if they make air-conditioned mosquito suits?

Photographing birds in the Everglades is challenging but with so many targets you can be sure to get many subjects to work with.  My next post will deal with photographing birds and working to get correct exposure in direct sunlight.