Birds in flight:

Wood stork

White pelicans

Little Blue Heron (juvenile white morph)

Roseate Spoonbill

Alas, we too had to fly home. We ended the day, that had included lunch on the beach, back in Pittsburgh where snow from the latest storm still lies on the hills.

By the end of our trip in the Everglades, a few stereotypes we had originally dismissed reasserted themselves for us.

1: Crocodiles. We had corrected a few people before departing that it's alligators you encounter in the Everglades, not crocodiles. Of course, we had to be proved wrong, and did see one specimen of the much-rarer American Crocodile.



2: "Swamp." Most of the Everglades is technically sawgrass prairie. It does get flooded with slow-flowing water for good parts of the year, but was largely dry during our visit.



On our last day in the park, we did a ranger-led "Slough Slog" which took us through some of the prairie but also into some wetter, boggier areas.



I'm checking the water depth here before starting some real slogging.



3: Alligators are scary. Despite the creep factor, alligators are generally very sedentary... almost to the point of seeming boring after a while. On the very last evening in the park, though, some were putting on quite a show.



What I didn't capture on video was the attempted feeding frenzy a few minutes later. The water stirred suddenly, and several huge fish started jumping clean out of the water. Some came close to jumping flat onto shore in order to escape the clasping gator jaws.

A few fun photos from the week:


Monday: It's amazing what silly things you can get your subjects to do as soon as you're pointing a camera

Tuesday: After paddling a kayak solo on Sunday, I thought working a tandem would be a breeze with the extra engine. It turns out there's more to it than that: not only is all the weight no longer right in the middle but the paddles aren't centered anymore either. All that makes for harder control, and with rougher water it all added up to a tougher day. As we got a good way up the creek we were exploring, though, things settled down and we could spend some time at a very relaxed pace.

Thursday: The only half hour of bad weather we got the whole trip started 20 minutes before heading out on a snorkelling trip in the Florida Keys. When we bought our tickets an hour earlier it was nice and sunny, but it was pouring by the time we boarded the boat. Luckily, things cleared up just as quickly as they turned bad and we ended up having a perfectly nice time out on the reef.

Friday: Trying to get a shot of the four of us...

After kayaking on Tuesday, we stopped for lunch at a place that had gatorburgers on the menu. If you could imagine a hybrid of turkey and fish, that's what the meat kind of tasted like.

We're striving to keep the following inequality strictly true for the remainder of the trip:

(Quantity of alligator consumed by Chris and Monika) > (Quantity of Chris and Monika consumed by alligators)

Monika has been getting into bird-watching over the years, and one of the nice things about this trip to Florida is that it gives an opportunity to see a really wide variety of shore birds and wetland birds. A few photos:

Great Egret

American White Ibis

Osprey

Anhinga (drying off after some underwater fishing)

Little Blue Heron (a particularly inquisitive one)

Tricolored Heron

Wood Stork (endangered)

Great Blue Heron

Sanderlings (running)

Bald Eagle (still working on our identification skills a bit)

Alright, so I'd done a blog post about the everglades and I didn't even mention either of the two things that people are most likely to associate with them: fan-boats and alligators (I knew I'd get at least one comment about this).

Fan-boats are actually barred from the park itself, and we've always preferred self-propelled modes of transportation anyway; we've stuck to kayaks, canoes, bikes, etc.

Alligators, on the other hand, are not barred from the park. So we have seen some of those:



We biked down along (the confusingly named) Shark Valley trail, where we saw dozens. Many were no farther from the trail than the one in the photo below.



Afterwards we also talked to a ranger as we strolled along the path.

"So, as you can see, there are alligators all down along the path here. So why aren't we really scared of walking by them? Well, first off, they have a buffet dinner of fish and birds laid out in the creek in front of them for whenever they get hungry. Secondly, gators wouldn't normally think of us as food anyway. We're too big."

As we continued to walk down the path, we passed a woman crouching down with her arm outstretched; her friend was taking a photo in which the perspective made it look like she was petting the gator a few feet behind her.

"Now, making yourself look as small as possible is a good way to confuse the alligator and make it think you're closer to its usual size of prey."



Above: an alligator next its usual size of prey. Below: Mat doing his best impression (don't worry, this was actually taken in a separate, gatorless place)

We decided to escape the Pittsburgh winter for a week (below freezing with 3 inches of snow forecast for tonight), and take a trip down to Florida. Our friend Mateusz studies law in Naples, FL, which seems to be perpetually sunny and 26 degrees (C, of course).

Naples is just an hour outside of the Everglades National Park, so one of the first things we did was drive down to join a ranger-led canoe/kayak exploring trip.




We spent a few hours floating through Mangrove forests, checking out all sorts of different wildlife (more on that in upcoming posts). As far as plant life goes, aside from the mangroves themselves, we came across this Strangler Fig encasing itself around a palm tree.




Mat thought it would be a good idea to give it a taste of its own medicine and encase the fig for a change, with a couple pairs of tree-hugging arms no less.