Everglades National Park

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Geo: 25.3945, -80.5818

Won't add much information here. Just click on the first picture to see all of the pictures on this page in an album with comments. When you finish with the ones in this album click on "Close" at the top right of the screen to be returned to this page. Then click "Next entry" at the botom of this page to go to pictures of the next park. This page has pictures from Everglades National Park. I'll add additional pages for Biscayne and Dry Tortugas.

A note of special appreciation to my sister-in-law, Cherrie Sneed, birder extraordinaire, for identifying all the bird pictures for me.

Hope you enjoy the pictures!

Lee

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Photos

Black Vultures
These critters were all over southern Florida. Could be the state bird. These are Black Vultures as opposed to Turkey Vultures which have a red head. There are signs in the park warning that vultures can damage cars. They like to eat rubber - windshield wipers, rubber seals, tires, etc. Fortunately our rental car had no damage. We parked in the sun and they seemed to like shaded cars better.
Taken in the parking lot at the Anhinga Trail.

Anhinga
This is the Anhinga or "Snake Bird". These birds do not have oily feathers so they don't float well, but they can easily dive and swim underwater in search of food, fish mostly I think. When swimming on the surface only their head and neck are above water so they look like a snake swimming - thus their nickname. Once out of the water they must dry their feathers before they can fly well. That's what this one is doing - drying its feathers. Taken on the Anhinga Trail in Everglades NP.

Double-crested Cormorants with a Wood Stork
Lots of these Double-Crested Cormorants along the Anhinga Trail. The Wood Stork was neat. More about him in the next picture.

Wood Stork
Taken along the Anhinga Trail. The Wood Stork was placed on the endangered species list in 1984. It feeds not by sight but by touch, tacto-location, in shallow, often muddy water full of plants where fish can't be seen. Walking slowly forward it sweeps its submerged bill slowly from side to side. When it touches its prey, mostly small fish, the bill snaps shut with a 25-millisecond reflex action, the fastest reflex known for vertebrate species.

Great Blue Heron
Taken from the Anhinga trail. Saw quite a few of these on this trail and elsewhere in the park.

Great Egret with breeding plumage
Taken along the Anhinga Trail. Saw several egrets in the park but this was the prettiest.

Gators
One picture of the many gators we saw along the Anhinga trail.

Dwarf Cyprus Trees
Taken in Everglades from the road to Flamingo point. These trees looked dead but had only lost their needles which they do in the "dry" season. The literature about the park indicates that S. Florida has two seasons - wet and dry. Wet is late spring to early fall while dry is late fall to early spring. January was in the middle of the dry season. These trees are very old but small because of the poor quality of the boggy soil here.

On the canal to Coot Bay
After walking the Anhinga trail, we drove to the end of the road at Flamingo. This complex of buildings included a visitor center and a concessionaire for canoe, kayak, and bike rentals. We rented a canoe and took a paddle up about 3.5 miles up this canal to Coot bay. Picture is taken just as we entered the bay.

Osprey
This Osprey (I thought it was an eagle) was feeding on a fish in a tree along the canal to Coot Bay. If you look closely, you can see the fish in its talons.

In Florida Bay
After our paddle to and from Coot Bay, we swapped canoes and paddled out into Florida Bay, a very shallow but very large body of water at the southern tip of Florida, It is less than 6 feet deep in most places, and we could touch the bottom with our paddles where we were most of the time. This picture was taken of the many birds - pelican, ibis, heron, osprey, etc. - perched in the mangrove trees along the shore. Believe we saw an eagle with a fish in its talons flying along the shoreline but couldn't get a good picture of it

Brown Pelicans
Taken from the canoe in Florida Bay, there were lots of these Brown Pelicans perched in the mangrove trees along the shoreline. They are migratory birds and must spend the winter months in South Florida.

Gator Farm gators
On the morning of the second day of our trip, we visited the Everglades Alligator Farm. This is a picture of some of the young alligators there. This place also had airboat rides which was our main reason for visiting the farm.

On the Airboat
Airboats are not allowed in the park due to the loud noise and damage to the marshy grasslands that they pass over. The ride at the Alligator Farm uses the same route all the time, thus minimizing the damage.

Pinelands hiking trail
After the airboat ride, we took our one long hike of the trip in the Everglades NP. This tree along the trail had two monitors of some sort mounted on the trunk. If you look closely, you can see them - one about a foot above the ground and the other about 2/3 of the way up the trunk on the right. Looked like they may have had cameras in them. Don't know if they were monitoring wildlife or what but they may have gotten my picture a couple of times as I looked closely at them.

Nike assembly building
In 1965, the US Army built a permanent Nike missile launch site within Everglades NP. This site replaced a temporary site established just outside the park in October 1962, immediately following the Cuban missle crisis. It was decommissioned in 1979, the last of the Nike bases to close. After our hike in the morning, we took a tour of the site given by one of the men who had been stationed at the site. Due to the size of the missles, they were transported to the site in pieces and had to be assembled there. This is where they were assembled. The building, designed and built by the Army Corps of Engineers, was 41 feet wide at its widest. The assembled missile was 42 feet long. Go figure. An extremely interesting tour.

Nike Missile Barn
This is where the assembled missiles were stored. Four launch pads were mounted on the concrete in front of the barn but were removed when the site closed. There were three barns, each with four missles for a total of 12 missiles always ready to be fired if the need arose. Eight missiles had nuclear warheads, four had conventional explosives. Fortunately none were ever fired from this base - in anger or otherwise. All training and test firings were done in New Mexico.

Nike Bunker
These earthcovered, concrete bunkers were where the crew retreated in the case of a launch. After mounting the missiles on their launcher, the crew raced to this bunker to initiate the launch. They had 15 minutes to mount the missile, get in the bunker, and launch the missile.