FLORIDA EVERGLADES, Alligators and Florida eco system

Everglades Chamber Of Commerce The Everglades which comprise some two-thirds more land than the 1.5 million acres within Everglades National Park have been shrinking for decades. They are now about a fifth of their original size, and much of the shrinkage has occurred in the last 50 years. Other than scientists and environmentalists, it is hard to tell who cares.

This special tour by Miami Nice Tours includes entrance to the Everglades Outpost Wildlife Refuge and the Alligator Farm as well as an airboat ride. hand, exotic birds, alligators, crocodiles, and the largest collection of venomous snakes in South Florida. The Everglades Alligator Farm is a real working alligator farm with literally thousands of alligators. the only way to see this "river of grass" since normal boats can't navigate the Everglade' foot depths.

Everglades Airboat Rides

Hire a car in Miami and take the time to investigate the amazing natural and cultural wonders outside of the city. With the endless sun kissed beaches of the Florida Keys, Gold Coast, and Treasure Coast you could spend weeks simply relaxing in the sun. The Florida Everglades are teeming with life, including the infamous alligators. Hire a car in Miami and you could explore this amazing region for your self (watch out for swamps!).

Everglades Crocodiles The airboat signs on Highway 41 start just west of Miami, where the stucco sprawl of Little Havana gives way to South Florida's vast, mucky wilderness of saw grass, mangroves and cypress trees.

The Everglades, which were formed by the constant overflow of nearby Lake Okeechobee, are home to flamingos and alligators, among others.

Everglades Crocodile Beckoned by promises of swamps and alligators, you can pull over and pay $20 to glide for a while on an airboat, flat-bottomed and wide, propelled by a huge fan so noisy that guides hand out cotton for your ears. Wherever you stop, the view is essentially the same: marshland so flat and expansive you can almost tell the world is round, and sense its limits. You may see snapping turtles, egrets and herons that look almost prehistoric and, of course, alligators, lured into camera range by marshmallows, which the guides keep tossing until the film runs out.

Spanning the southern tip of the Florida peninsula and most of Florida Bay, Everglades National Park is the only subtropical preserve in North America. It contains both temperate and tropical plant communities, including sawgrass prairies, mangrove and cypress swamps, pinelands, and hardwood hammocks, as well as marine and estuarine environments. The park is known for its rich bird life, particularly large wading birds, such as the roseate spoonbill, wood stork, great blue heron and a variety of egrets. It is also the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles exist side by side.

Tampa Everglades The wind rustles the tall grasses in this landscape obstructed only by occasional tree islands, held sacred by the Miccosukee Indians, who still inhabit parts of the Everglades. The only other sounds are the soft splashes of fish jumping, the calls of wading birds and the beating of their wings, and the chirring of insects.

Renting a car in Florida is great way to see as many of the sights as possible at your own pace. If you have the time you can take a trip to the Florida Everglades and marvel at the rugged natural beauty of these amazing swamplands and their fierce alligators! Of course, Universal Studios, Seaworld, Walt Disney World and the thrill of Daytona Beach are just some of the other amazing holiday features easily accessible from Sanford.

Florida Alligator Take off your shoes and climb into the shallow muck for a moment some guides will stop to let you, well before the marshmallows come out and it feels oozy and primeval and mysterious between your toes.

Florida Python This is about as deep as anyone goes into the Everglades, one of the world's most unusual ecosystems and the battlefield in one of history's costliest and most protracted environmental wars.

Florida Airboat Rides Everyone has heard of this place. But even those who live and work on its fringes tend to regard it from a distance, as if a region so forbidding, wrapped up in political struggles so old and so complicated, can only defy understanding.

Everglades County The background is simple enough. For thousands of years, water from 730-square-mile Lake Okeechobee, just north of the Everglades, spilled south in lazy sheets toward the ocean. That constant, slow coursing created marshy rivers and saw-grass prairies that nurtured myriad species of birds, snakes and fish, plus deer, panthers, alligators, bears and manatees.

Yellow Pages Florida But the fate of this soggy habitat changed significantly in the boom years after World War II, when homeowners in new subdivisions demanded drinking water and flood protection. At the same time, Florida's growing sugar industry started taking over what had been the Northern Everglades (now formally designated the Everglades Agricultural Area) and craving water for farming. So engineers constructed a maze of canals to divert much of the lake overflow toward the cane fields and away from newly populated areas. During seasons of heavy rain, like the unusually wet summer that just passed, the canals also keep the sugar fields from flooding.

Everglades Orlando As a result of all this, the Everglades which comprise some two-thirds more land than the 1.5 million acres within Everglades National Park have been shrinking for decades. They are now about a fifth of their original size, and much of the shrinkage has occurred in the last 50 years.

Python Everglades A great deal of the water that still reaches the Everglades is polluted with phosphates from agricultural and household runoff, spawning cattails that choke the marshes and crowd out native plants and animals. The wading-bird population is only 10 percent of what it was in the late 1800's. Many species are disappearing, including the Florida panther, the wood stork and the Cape Sable sparrow.

Everglades Palm Beach Other than scientists and environmentalists, it is hard to tell who cares. The drawn-out, convoluted Everglades drama seems to have captured few imaginations in South Florida, whose state of mind is far more attuned to sun and surf than to buggy marsh. "Most people think it is a yucky, mucky place," said Lyle Thomas, president of Loxahatchee Everglades Tours, which he started as a "responsible" alternative to the sometimes reckless airboat operators along Highway 41.

Ft Lauderdale Everglades People like Mr. Thomas have their theories about why so many Floridians do not bother with the Everglades. The low, monotonous landscape lacks the majesty of the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, they say, which helps explain why only 1.1 million people visited Everglades National Park last year, compared with seven million at Walt Disney World. Park attendance peaked in the 1970's, at 1.7 million; surveys show that visitors rarely come back. The Everglades are confusing, even frightening: many people associate them with the grisly ValuJet crash of 1996 or, rightly, with mosquitoes and poisonous snakes.

Everglades Tours Ask Mr. Thomas to explain the Everglades, and he'll let you know that you are in for a long conversation. "Do you want the facts that were, the facts that might be tomorrow, or the facts that are here today?" he asked.

Airboat Everglades Some unchanging facts are these: The federal government sued Florida in 1988 to stop polluted water from harming the Everglades. Sugar companies intervened, and a settlement that included a cleanup plan was reached in 1994. That year the State Legislature passed the Everglades Forever Act, which established cleanup rules not just for federal land, but for the entire Everglades area.

Flordia Everglades The deadline for cutting out all pollutants was 2006, but recently state officials, pressured by the sugar industry, said they could not meet it. In May, over the objections of environmentalists and a federal district judge overseeing the cleanup, the Legislature pushed back the deadline until at least 2013. Gov. Jeb Bush approved the measure, but Republicans in Congress warned that the delay could jeopardize the federal share of financing for the project, expected to cost at least $8 billion. In the latest twist, the judge, William M. Hoeveler, was disqualified from the case by another federal judge in September after publicly saying Mr. Bush had been "misled by persons who do not care about the Everglades."

Everglades Miami Ridding Everglades water of phosphates is only one task in the cleanup. The project is also supposed to stop the diversion of floodwater into rivers that lead to the ocean, instead storing that water in a new network of reservoirs and underground wells. The stored water would total as much as 1.7 billion gallons a day, and much of it would be distributed to the Everglades as needed, renewing, in an artificial way, the old sheet flow on which the River of Grass thrived. But a good amount of it too much, environmentalists fear would go to farmland and development.

Florida Aligators Scientists like Robert Shuford, who conducts experiments to see if the plan will work, cannot say for sure that the $8 billion or more will be well spent. Mr. Shuford, the lead environmental scientist for the South Florida Water Management District, frequently steers airboats into the swamps to take water samples and look for signs of improvement resulting from the pollution cuts achieved so far: an abundance of lily pads and blue-green algae, or a decrease in cattails.

Alligator Everglades "We're still putting the whole picture together," Mr. Shuford said one afternoon, adding that he and other scientists had only old Indian maps and explorers' journals to plumb for clues about how deep the water was supposed to be at various points throughout the Everglades.

Naples Fl Everglades But as scientists work to undo the damage of past decades, the Everglades are under new development pressures, this time from the west. The area around Naples, on Florida's southwest coast, is one of the fastest-growing in the country. Real estate is booming there in new, gated communities with names like the Habitat, Wildcat Run and Ibis Cove.

Everglades Aligators "See Florida the way it used to be," Mr. Thomas's business brochure says. And while the restoration project may not bring back the old Everglades, people like him hope that it will at least make them better understood and appreciated in this state, whose population is growing by about 900 people a day.

Naples Everglades "The end of the day happens, and you can see it happen out there," Mr. Thomas said of the unobstructed expanse of water and sky that he views from his airboat a small one, mind you miles out on the saw-grass plain.

Fort Lauderdale Everglades By Abby Goodnough
New York Times - 11/4/2003

Topic: Wetlands

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