We are past the halfway point. The past two weeks has taken on an incredible series of adventures. We have been traveling in the land north of Lake Okeechobee, otherwise known as the Northern Everglades. We paddleboarded east down Josephine Creek. We kayaked north across blustery Lake Istokpoga, and ground our way upstream through Arbuckle Creek, all the way to the Avon Park Air Force Range.

We turned east again through the bombing range and found our way to the Kissimmee River, where engineers have restored natural meanders and habitat to the banks. We swam the Kissimmee and slogged east across the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, where we were shown the stronghold of Florida grasshopper sparrow, arguably the rarest bird in North America. From KPPSP we biked north, to the Latt Maxcy and Destiny properties south of SR 60. From SR 60 we biked north on the Peavine Trail to the Adams Ranch on Lake Marian, on Saturday, one week ago. Mallory rejoined the expedition after too long away. Bad weather on Sunday forced us to hike from the Adams camp west onto Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area. Our plan to kayak through Lake Marian, Lake Jackson and Lake Kissimmee en route to Brahma Island was spoiled by 30-40 mph wind gusts out of the northwest. Instead we hiked 10 miles due west to the banks of Lake Kissimmee. In howling wind and three foot chop we struggled across the lake for the toughest two miles of the expedition, finally arriving at Brahma Island just as dark fell. We spent a day recuperating on the island. On Tuesday paddled north again, and again the wind pounded us in the afternoon. Lake Hatchineha and the Creek Ranch became our home for Tuesday and Wednesday nights. On Thursday we went on horseback from the Creek Ranch to The Nature Conservancy’s Disney Wilderness Preserve headquarters near Poinciana in Osceola County. With us were members of the Northern Everglades Alliance, an group of ranchers and conservationists committed to conserving the working landscape of central Florida for water and wildlife. DWP marked the northernmost extent of our movements in the Everglades Watershed. We spent a night with Carlos Vergara at his Camp Lonesome near Keenansville. This morning we began hiking again at Three Lakes WMA, heading east towards the St. Johns River watershed.

We are in the beginning of a fairly difficult section of the Expedition, on a couple of fronts. This is physically grueling work on some days. On Monday we hiked from the Hendrie Ranch near Venus to Archbold Biological Station. Walking the station’s firelanes, especially during the dry season, is a chore. We did about 9 miles that day. At the end of our slog we were treated to Archbold’s newly completed dormitory and learning center.
Tuesday was both a mental and physical workout, as we held a couple of workshops in the scrub with Archbold scientists. After lunch we held a round table and interviewed with some media members. Then late at night I was tucked in behind my keyboard, typing. Both Carlton and I were up until 2 and had to be awake before 7. This is fairly typical behavior in times when we have cellular service and wireless access.

Wednesday we covered another 9 miles, and this too was mostly on freshly disced firelanes. It felt blistering hot and dry all day. My water was down to about half a liter by the time we arrived at our campsite, where our provisions were cached.

Fortunately neither of our two most recent hikes have been under full weight. Thursday we hiked north with packs 13 miles to Josephine Creek, which crosses US 27 north of Lake Placid and connects to Lake Istokpoga.

Toward the end of the day, short of our end point and short on daylight, we had our driver Rick Smith meet us at a shell road to the west of Lake June in Winter so we could switch to bicycling for speed.

This is also a difficult region for long distance movement of animals. Thursday our route included a section of corridor west of the town of Placid Lakes that is absolutely critical to maintaining connectivity north and south across SR 70. It was another interesting opportunity to observe a landscape feature from the perspective of a bear. Three of the past four travel days have included crossings of US 27 and SR 70, two arterial, high speed highways that divide this landscape and produce scores of roadkilled animals each year, including bears.

Facilitating functional connectivity for bears and other species across these two highways are also essential at both regional and state scales. If these roads become increasingly impassable as traffic and development increase, the Highlands-Glades bear subpopulation will become fragmented and one of the best opportunities for connecting conservation lands all the way from south Florida to north Florida will be lost. Fortunately, there are very good opportunities to protect these landscapes and potentially construct wildlife crossings in the future to further facilitate connectivity.

As we hiked Wednesday we became aware of habitat becoming more narrow as we neared the road. Citrus groves lined either side of a small neck of scrub extending north toward SR 70. We stood at the road edge, pondering all this as a particularly careful bear might. Mid-day traffic flew past us. Finally a gap in the delivery trucks and RV’s came and we scampered across to safety.

The FWCE project hinges on these narrow, mostly linear areas that animals are known to use for travel. The corridor we hiked Thursday provides egress for male black bears in breeding season through an otherwise risky, open landscape, ideally so that they can access females and reproduce.

Every day we face challenges as we travel from point to point. Overcoming each obstacle gives us all a sense of adventure. We have been extremely fortunate at many turns. The completion of each day’s route brings a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, not to mention the gratitude we have to landowners and stewards who allow us access. The presence of wildlife and their use of these same routes (which the University of Kentucky bear project and FFWCC panther biologists have documented) is a hopeful thing that keeps me going, in a sense. Walking the corridor on Thursday I passed shiny new signs along Fisheating Creek, delineating a conservation easement covering nearly 30,000 acres of protected working ranch lands. In July 2010 the US Department of Agriculture made this unprecedented investment in the northern reaches of Fisheating Creek, designed to protect the headwaters through the Wetlands Reserve Program. Multiple stakeholders have had to work to find common ground in order to make big deals like the Fisheating Creek WRP happens. It seems like there is a developing recognition among among the private landowners and the conservation community that they have more common interests than either side previously thought. If implementation of the easement works, it will mean there will ways be at least for animals to move in a vital movement corridor.

We have had two amazing days at Archbold Biological Station, near Lake Placid, Florida. The station’s executive director, Hilary Swain, joined us Sunday night and led us onto Archbold property on Monday. We followed Hilary through about 9 miles of beautiful rosemary scrub and scrubby flatwoods.

Most who know Hilary would say she generally sets a blistering pace, and her approach to hiking is no different. Fortunately Dr. Swain cannot resist a chance to give lessons in the scrub, so whenever we stopped we were treated to some of the amazing natural history of the Lake Wales Ridge.
Upon reaching the station we were welcomed by Highlands County Commissioner and Archbold board of trustees member Barbara Stewart.

We spent the late afternoon with two visiting researchers, Zach Forsburg of the Orriane Society and Jennifer Smith of Virginia Tech. Both are conducting telemetry studies on their respective species of interest.
Forsburg is working for the Orriane Society, which is focused on indigo snake research and conservation.
www.orrianesociety.org
We watched Zach track one of his study animals to an abandoned gopher tortoise burrow, where he lead us through the natural history of these amazing creatures.

http://m.flickr.com/photos/carltonward/6919605339/lightbox/

Jennifer is working as a post-doctoral researcher for Virginia Tech, helping continue a long-term research project on caracara. Caracara are a large species of falcon, which thrives on the improved pasture habitat that dominates the this region of Florida. We visited a nesting pair of caracara on the Archbold Reserve, a 5000 acre grassland west of the main station where restoration projects are ongoing and a local leases cattle. The pair of caracara watched us suspiciously as we conducted our interview with Jennifer.
Though we had no traveling scheduled for Tuesday, it was as busy a day as we have had since the launch. First we visited the scrub with two of the station’s long tenured lab heads. Dr. Eric Menges of the plant ecology lab guided us through some of the many rare plants of the southern Lake Wales Ridge. Dr. Mark Deyrup of the entomology lab gave us an overview of the insect pollinators that are constantly at work here. A little later in the morning, Reed Bowman of the avian ecology lab introduced the gathering throng of media and expedition team members to the scrub jay research. Reed and his team are responsible for one of the five longest-termed data sets for a single species.
After a big lunch at the station’s new Frances Archbold Hufty Center, we sat for a round table discussion. Panelists included Tom Hoctor, Dr. Swain, Carlton, Julie Morris of Wildlands Conservation, and Thomas Eason, Director of Habitat and Species Conservation for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Before leaving, Dr. Swain led us to the station’s new black bear diorama. We spent a short while explaining the bear project, which I worked on, and talking about the legacy of Dave Maehr and Mason Smoak, for whom the bear diorama is to be named.

By the end of the round table, after two additional radio interviews, I was ready for a break from the action. Joe Davenport, Tom, Julie and I snuck off to Lake Annie. Though there have been some cool nights recently, and the day wasn’t particularly hot, I had been looking forward to jumping into the lake for too long. After a refreshing dip we took one of the station canoes out so Tom and I could steal a few minutes of fishing before dark. We caught about a dozen largemouth bass and one very nice chain pickerel before calling it a night.

The Expedition has reached Highlands County, in south central Florida. Since leaving the Caloosahatchee River ten days ago, we have traveled across properties with existing conservation easements. Some easements we touched are built around the protection of water in the Fisheating Creek watershed. Other easements we crossed included habitat mitigation banks for the gopher tortoise.
Our trek through the opportunity area for the Babcock to Fisheating Creek corridor was not easy. We found ourselves under heavy packs, trudging down recently disced firelanes under unseasonably warm conditions. We bushwacked for the better part of a day in Glades County. Ultimately, we found our way east from Babcock Ranch through intact habitat all the way to south Highlands County. Multiple black bears that the University of Kentucky (myself included) tracked with GPS collars during a 5 year period made this same trek, making long movements west before ultimately turning around and heading back to Glades County and Highlands County. As we entered bear project stomping grounds at the Smoak Ranch near Venus, Florida I realized I had been walking on conservation land for three days almost continuously, if not for a half an hour spent walking down a road heading east out of Palmdale. Despite the years I’ve spent studying this landscape, until I physically traveled over it I did not fully appreciate the connections that remain. Certainly more can be done to ensure viable corridors for large animals exist in perpetuity, but what we experienced suggested that the habitat in Charlotte, Glades and south Highlands County is still suitable for traveling wildlife. The bear data from Highlands County supports this idea. Through cooperative efforts between ranchers and agencies this part of the Florida Wildlife Corridor stands a good chance of remaining in existence.
My appreciation for the role of the private landowner in conservation began to take shape after coming to know one family in particular, onto whose land we finally crossed at midday Saturday. The Smoak family helped get the bear project started, through a relationship the family had with my former boss, Dave Maehr. Dave was an outspoken proponent of the idea that private landowners were key to the conservation of the Florida panther. As we walked across the Smoak cattle pasture I stepped over the entrance to a burrowing owl burrow. Along the way we found the remains of two unfortunate June beetles, skewered on the barbed wire fence by loggerhead shrike. As we made our way west toward the Smoak camphouse we passed by the pine tree where I caught the first bear of my career.
Tracee Smoak, the wife of Mason, the pilot who died with Dave in 2008, met us at the camphouse. Their three children ran among the pines and clumps of palmetto, chasing each other and squealing. The full circle way of things began to push itself into my thoughts. This is a territory I know and love, and I, like Dave was, take great satisfaction from knowing that it is and will likely always be in good hands.

31 January 2012

We came to Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge under an I-75 underpass designed to facilitate the movement of wildlife and water. We began at Picayune Strand State Forest and hiked north to the highway, beyond which is the Panther Refuge.

We’d spent the previous afternoon meeting with Florida Department of Forestry officials discussing a large-scale water restoration project underway at that property. The wildlife underpasses were integrated into Alligator Alley during its conversion to I-75 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the end of construction there were 36 wildlife underpasses, 8 feet tall, 70 feet wide and 100 feet long. Ten foot chain link fences bracket the road, funneling wildlife toward the passages. It was a massive project with a $77 million price tag.

The investment appears to be paying off. In 1990, biologists estimated that there were roughly 30 panthers left in the wild. Vehicle traffic on Alligator Alley threatened to reduce panther numbers even further. Since the underpass construction panther roadkill numbers on the Alley have dropped dramatically. In the same span of time, through focused habitat conservation efforts by the state of Florida and federal government (including the creation of the 26,400 acre refuge in 1989), population estimates have increased. There is also good evidence that the introduction of Texas cougars in the mid-1990s provided an influx of genes that benefited panther demographics. Today the panther estimate ranges between 100 and 160 cats. Additional underpasses are now located on SR 29, a north-south road on the refuge’s eastern boundary. Engineers have worked with biologists to design smaller, less costly underpass structures that can be integrated on smaller 2-lane roads, which annually claim the majority of panther roadkill.

Many factors have contributed to the improvement in the panther population. The reduction of panther roadkills may also have to do with increased awareness by motorists and better signage and speed limit enforcement. Just this year the FDOT began placing Roadside Animal Detection Systems, solar powered signs that use flashing LED lights to alert drivers when large animals approach roads. Nevertheless, roads are still responsible for killing panthers. Forty-three cats have been killed on Florida roads since 2009, not including the two cats that have already died in 2012. This challenge notwithstanding, the construction of Alligator Alley underpasses is a successful mitigation effort, allowing the flow of wildlife between large conservation properties across an interstate highway. The construction of a four lane, heavy traffic highways slicing through panther and other species habitat would have had devastating effects on the ecological integrity of adjacent conservation lands, but the numerous and well designed underpasses greatly enhanced species connectivity under the expanded highway. Although panthers were the primary focus for designing the underpasses, many other species have been documented using them including Florida black bear, bobcats, alligators, turkey, and deer. The underpasses also facilitate the flow of water southward to the Picayune and Fakahatchee strands. Continuity with adjoining properties seems to be a theme in this landscape. Multiple agencies must continue to work together to meet these challenges.

For me, the I-75 underpasses are a symbol of the conservation biology movement in the early days. Using what data there were available back in the late 1980s on the panther, scientists and policy makers helped engineer an effective solution. It was not an easy or inexpensive process, but appears to have worked well. I remember one of the first lectures I heard my late graduate school advisor and committed conservation scientist Dr. Dave Maehr give. In it he showed a slide of one of the underpasses and talked about the difficulty of getting the structures paid for, a process he was involved in as the leader of the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission’s (which is now the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission or FFWCC) panther research team. Dave matriculated at the University of Florida under Dr. Larry Harris, one of the central figures in the field of conservation biology in the 1980s and 1990s, when it became recognized as a scholarly discipline. Both Dave and Dr. Harris were shrewd negotiators, and both were capable of compromising in order to achieve meaningful conservation goals.

Dr. Harris oversaw the work of many other students who went on to become influential figures in Florida and across the globe, the most prominent of which is Dr. Reed Noss, who in the late 1980s was the first to propose network of connected conservation land in Florida, and has since written many articles and chapters on wildlife corridors and designing conservation land networks to conserve biodiversity. In the last twenty years, other students of Dr. Harris including Dr. Tom Hoctor and Dr. Dan Smith have worked on projects like the Florida Ecological Greenways Network and the prioritization of roadways for future wildlife underpasses to continue the work towards protecting a statewide network of functionally connected public and private conservation lands, aided by a future comprehensive system of wildlife crossing structures across Florida’s large network of highways.

Another of Dr. Harris’ former students was waiting to meet us at the underpass. Darrell Land of FFWCC eventually replaced Dave Maehr as the panther recovery team leader after Dave left the agency to pursue a Ph.D. in conservation biology, and has been in the position now for nearly 20 years. As we approached the underpass in the bright morning we saw Darrell walking toward us, along with Kevin Godsea, the refuge manager for USFWS, and Laurie MacDonald of Defenders of Wildlife. Together the group represented many years of experience in panther biology and policy decisions. As if to remind us of the need to maintain our effort and our focus despite the challenge and high cost of protecting the species and its landscape, a perfectly preserved pair of panther tracks, one male, one female, were waiting in the dried out mud of the underpass.

See a map of our route for this week of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition. We hope to be able to add these to our blog each week.

FWCE_Week 3

On Sunday we had another day of no traveling, and we had a busy dance card. First, our friends Clyde and Niki Butcher arrived at our cabin. Elam and the Butchers have been very close for many years and have spent years of their lives together in Florida’s swamps. Carlton drew inspiration from the focus Clyde’s work brought to the backwater areas of Florida. They’d only arrived back in Florida the previous day, after spending weeks in the west photographing places like the Grand Canyon.

We spent the late morning and early afternoon wading through the swamp north of the cabin, on a mission to find the Guzmania, a rare genus of bromeliad. We stepped off the road toward the swamp. Feeling the January water rise up above my knee heightened awareness. But the shock quickly went away. The walking was easy, though we moved slowly to avoid tripping on tree roots beneath the surface. We gathered in a small area where the cypress knees and pop ash were adorned with light green bromeliads. They clung to every surface. Carlton and Clyde worked through several sequences of photographs. Clyde compared his recent experiences of the west with Florida. “Out there, you can see everything from your car,””he said, referring to the wide open space and the dramatic scenery. “Here, if you want to see anything, you have to get out and get your feet in the mud.”

“In the water,” someone chirped.

In the afternoon our party expanded to include Renee Rau, Mike Owen, and Donna Glann Smyth from Florida State Parks, and Tom Maish from Friends of Fakahatchee. They tracked us into the swamp, emerging from a bank of cutgrass and stepping over a large cypress log, which was in the process of being swallowed by sprouting cocoa plum and young cypress. We all stood knee deep in the stained water and greeted each other. I was intent to talk to Mike Owen, a man whose personality is matched by an expansive natural history knowledge. Mike has worked at Fakahatchee since 1992, leading interpretive swamp walks, monitoring air plants and orchids as well as other species, and guiding management activity like prescribed fire and the removal of invasive species. He knows the Fakahatchee Strand like no one else. It was in his first 6 months on the job that the infamous John Laroche was caught taking rare orchids from the swamp. At the time, Mike Owen was new to the swamp and its hidden gems. Mike told me that Laroche was so cavalier about his exploits that as he stood surrounded by garbage bags full of the poached flowers that day, he gave an impromptu field lesson, teaching the young biologist several species of orchid. The Laroche story was eventually made into a book by Susan Orleans called “The Orchid Thief,” and subsequently, the movie “Adaptation.”

After lunch we trekked into an area called the Western Slough. It was more open than the thick, jungle-like growth we found among the Guzmania, and the water snaked through tall cypress and entered a stand of pond apple, where we paused. The sun moved lower in the sky. I asked about the effect of geology on plant communities, and what makes the Grand Canyon of Florida so different than anyplace else. Mike told us that Fakahatchee’s unique airplants are supported by slow moving water flowing through a trench in the limestone substrate of south Florida. Beneath the protective canopy of bald cypress, the water remains cooler than the ambient temperature in the warm months and warmer during the cold months. The effect of this shielding from extreme cold is that the forest is able to support species that do not occur elsewhere on the North American continent. He’d taken us here to show us the orchids. Ghost orchid, dingy orchid (Mike is known to spit dramatically at the ground when repeating this unfortunate name), clamshell orchid…they are all there, including one dingy orchid that John Laroche had taken, and Mike had returned, lashing it to a tree two feet above the water. It’s the only one of 84 that survived. Many of the plants we saw have been alive in the swamp since before Mike Owen began working here.

The Fakahatchee Strand is a geologic feature, extending roughly 20 miles north and south, and roughly 5 miles wide. The northern extent is on Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, which we’d be visiting later in the week. It was easy to think about the landscape connection as we stood knee deep in the swamp with our naturalist friends. From where we stood the water fed south into the Ten Thousand Islands, one of the most important commercial fisheries in the United States near Everglades City. Around our legs the dark water slipped past us with an almost imperceptible slowness.

For more information on the Fakahatchee and Florida’s State Parks @ http://www.floridastateparks.org/fakahatcheestrand/

For some pictures from the trip through the Fakahatchee during the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition see my Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75103055@N03/sets/

and Carlton’s (much much better)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carltonward/

It was well after dark when we arrived at our destination, a small private inholding in Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. A carload of friends from Tampa arrived and met us near the end of the route. We traveled on bikes, following a little road north from Jane’s Scenic Trail about 2.5 miles before it opened into a tiny clearing. I could see the silhouettes of wild-growing royal palms towering in the dark. Cypress knees stood in dark water off the road on both sides. On the edge of a 2 acre lake was a tin shack with a porch and swing, a classic swamp hunting cabin. A good walkway led out to the lake, where yellow eyes drifted in the cutgrass and cattails. On the door was a plaque that read “Welcome to the Fakahatchee Hilton.” We bathed on the porch under cold water drawn from a well through an old green hand pump. We put on warm clean clothes as someone lit a campfire. We dragged out a grill and gorged on steaks and collard greens. Carlton sat near the fire with Suzie, who’d escaped law school long enough to travel with us for three days.

Our camphouse was simple, weather-beaten, swampy. It had a big porch on the front with a swing, and a balky screen door into a single room. The corrugated tin siding was streaked with rust. The owner said that in 1960 Hurricane Donna had blown the entire building back and left it lying at an angle to the rest of the clearing. He pointed out how one corner hung out over the swamp behind the house. A walkway had been erected around one corner to allow a person to get around the side without stepping into the swamp. They’d left it where the hurricane had put it.

The story of the connected landscape and connected water we’ve been following had added a dimension as we entered the flooded timber. There were big wild animals moving around somewhere near. I recalled reading my old advisor Dave Maehr’s panther book and his description of the Fakahatchee. The Florida black bear is common here. The night was still as we settled in to sleep. Somewhere in the night I woke and heard a pair of barred owls calling back and forth from a tree above the camphouse clearing, slipping into their bizarre laughter, their silhouettes bobbing rhythmically toward each other in the branches. In the night it felt like a far corner of the world.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week Carlton, Elam and I camped on and documented a remote tree island in Francis Taylor Wildlife Management Area north of SR 41 in Water Conservation Area 3A. It was a beautiful island, only a couple of acres but of moderate size for these small domes of trees. It was quiet too, and surrounded by clear water and stands of sawgrass. It was good to be there after camping for two days on the C-67 canal, within earshot of SR 41. The black surface of the water and the big cumulus clouds caught the slant of the sun, and the green grasses shone in the afternoon light. The beauty of the surrounding marsh was nearly enough to distract us from the real importance to conservation and restoration of the Everglades that the tree island itself represents.

The island we visited is one of many research sites under study by the South Florida Water Management District, led by Director of Wetland Watershed Science, Dr. Fred Sklar. Since 1998 Dr. Sklar and his squad of ecologists have been monitoring nutrient deposition, plant communities and succession, and the ecology of wildlife on tree islands. Prior to Dr. Sklar’s work, very little was known about this distinctive and prominent feature of the Everglades landscape.

We asked Dr. Sklar to help us understand what SFWMD knows and how it is trying to address tree island ecology. A team of scientists and water management officials, including Assistant Executive Director Robert Brown, met us at mid-morning Thursday, and spent the early afternoon huddled with us under a canopy of cocoa plum and pond apple near the head of the island, explaining to us the patterns they are uncovering with their work.

Human manipulation of water flow has interrupted the processes by which tree islands grow and survive. Since 1940 the number of islands scattered throughout the Everglades has plummeted. In WCA-3, for example, tree island acreage is down from 24,800 acres to roughly 8100 acres, and the number of islands has fallen by almost 60%. Dr. Sklar told us things began going wrong in the 1940s, when lower levels of water in the central Everglades dissolved the layer of peat that develops on tree islands. In the 1960s we reversed course and began raising and maintaining high water in WCA-3, which is still destructive to tree islands. High water levels inundating the dry parts of tree islands eventually kill the species that grow in the “head,” the upstream end of the island where elevation is highest and the least water-tolerant trees grow. High water prevents the germination of seeds, leading to a loss of tree regeneration and preventing the growth of understory species and young trees that would otherwise replace older or damaged trees as they die off. Elsewhere, at the perimeters of the Everglades ecosystem canaling and water distribution have starved tree islands out of existence.

From an ecological standpoint tree islands are the anchors for wildlife in the Everglades. They provide roosting habitat for wading bird species, such as white ibis, tri-colored and little blue heron, snowy egret, white egret and great blue heron. They are a dry refuge for species of all kinds, from birds and small mammals to snakes, frogs, turtles and lizards. Whitetail deer are commonly found on tree islands. Even Florida panther and black bear have been documented on tree islands, far from their normal upland haunts. These islands are hubs of biodiversity in what is otherwise an inhospitable landscape for terrestrial wildlife. As the islands die out they become more spread out, making it harder for wildlife to travel from island to island. The proximity of the islands to each other is what enables all species to travel and reproduce.

Despite the grim prognosis, Dr. Sklar and his team of ecologists have a full plate of research ahead of them. As the the Everglades watershed changes through the back-filling and decompartmentalization projects introduced under the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) of 2000, SFWMD is in position to monitor the effects on tree islands and biodiversity. At this point there seems to be agreement that less water is needed in areas such as the one where our tree island was located, while many other areas have to be re-inundated in order to restore the processes that generate tree islands. Continued research is vital to our understanding of these unique islands.

As we rode back toward SR 41 on our visitors airboats the first rain of the expedition began to fall. It was a short sprinkle, but it punctuated the end of our ten days in this water-bound wilderness. I was energized by the new knowledge absorbed, and by the commitment of the scientists to make sure we finally get the water right in the Everglades.

For some mediocre pics of Everglades wading birds check out my Flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75103055@N03/sets/72157629064570853/

Day 2 of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition began at the Joe River Chickee. At least three of us (Carlton, Elam and Joe) awoke from a sleep of over four hours for the first time in weeks. The morning light came up and we saw that we were in a bowl of water about 1/4 mile wide. There were fish jumping near the base of the red mangrove trees all the way around our bowl. The sky was clear and there was no wind. It was humid, and the dew was as heavy as it would normally be in the wet season. Without much discussion, the morning took on a relaxed pace. We were all a little fried from the mental stresses of the preparation for our Expedition. It felt good to have left those worries behind, if only temporarily. We made breakfast with flatbread and Nutella and cream cheese with bananas. Elam tended the coffee press.

Mallory and Elam paddled out first around 11, while Carlton and I packed more slowly. As we got under way I fished a jig up next to the mangroves and caught a 12″ speckled trout. A slight north wind picked up. We made our way slowly. We stopped to follow a pair of dolphin smashing baitfish against the mangroves. Carlton fussed with my phone and its poor service. Several times he got far ahead of me during our paddle. I decided that I still needed to work on loading my kayak properly since everyone else was faster than me. It wasn’t until later that Carlton told me that he’d been frustrated with the wind and the poor service and that his speed was due to his “paddling emotionally.”

We caught up with Mallory and Elam at the second Joe River chickee, where we’d planned to eat lunch. They’d been waiting patiently for us for some time. The next leg would involve crossing a broad stretch of Oyster Bay, where we expected to get spray from the northwest across our boats. We were running behind after Carlton and I had spent too long on our first leg. I changed into rain gear, not wanting to arrive in the dark in wet clothes at a place where we could not build fires. We set out paddling and made good time across the bay. A small-ish leatherback sea turtle bobbed in the waves between the bow of my boat and Mallory’s boat. I stood up to get a better look and the turtle disappeared under water.

We arrived at the Oyster Bay chickee in short order. It was sheltered from the open bay by a narrow island of red mangrove trees. A juvenile yellow crowned night heron stalked sullenly across the elevated platform of the chickee as we drew near, and finally flew as our boats bumped the supports. As Elam was unloading his kayak he lost balance and toppled into the water. He was unhurt, and he’d already off loaded all of his camera equipment, so we all had a laugh as we documented the first casualty, including Elam.

Before sunset Mallory and I jumped aboard Travis 18′ Action Craft. We skimmed out across the bay as the sun was setting, blue and orange arching over a tall stand of mangrove and buttonwood trees that jutted out into the water. James McMurty played on the stereo. We made a few casts in a narrow creek hoping to find a snook or tarpon. It was a good time to be on the water, and I relished the idea of spending many of the next 100 days on the water at dusk.

For related photos go to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75103055@N03/sets