A male American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) bellows in a drainage ditch near the highway.
As much as I enjoy working with anoles, I’ve got to take a break from them once in a while. Luckily, I had a great opportunity last weekend to go shooting with two of South Florida’s best nature photographers. I got up early on Sunday and headed to Big Cypress National Preserve with photographers Mac Stone and Paul Marcellini, and local kayaking guide Garl (last name unimportant). Our objective was to find a couple of small lakes that Mac and Paul had only seen in satellite images. Big Cypress is about as dry as it gets right now, so a lot of wildlife would gather around the few remaining bodies of water. As we arrived at the Preserve parking area, I could already see that we were in for a good day – a few big alligators were bellowing right in the drainage ditches on the side of the road!
A Water Moccasin assumes a defensive posture. Mac Stone helped get the light just right with a gold reflector.
After hiking a few miles off the highway, and with a bit of help from the GPSes in our phones, we found the first lake. We emerged from dense swamp forest into a primeval-looking scene – in the early morning light, hundreds of alligators were crowded into a small lake surrounded by pond apples and dense blooming alligator flag. Herons and egrets were everywhere, and a bit of movement on the far shore alerted us to the presence of much larger game: a large adult black bear (Ursus americanus)! Bears are always present but seldom seen in the area – no one in our group had ever seen a bear in South Florida before. Unfortunately, once alerted to our presence, it ambled off, only giving Mac and Garl a chance for some distant “rump shots.” Still, it was a great way to start our day!
As we followed the tail-dragging tracks of alligators through a beautiful cypress strand toward a second lake, Mac spotted nearly stepped on a gorgeous water moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus). We photographed it (carefully!) and let it go about its business. I focused on closeups, but for a different interpretation than mine, you can see Paul’s beautiful wide-angle portrait of the snake . We found the second lake around midday. As we rested in the shade and ate our lunch, the alligators crowded into the pond were trying to catch a midday meal of their own. You see, fish get concentrated into these small lakes, just like the gators do, and the gators have a technique for hunting fish in shallow water: they leap out of the water, turn their heads sideways, and crash down onto their prey. We had a blast trying to capture this behavior, and you can see one lunge captured in the photo sequence below. One thing I didn’t notice this until examining the photos on my computer is that when the gator hits the water, hundreds of tiny fish scatter in every direction, many of them leaping out of the water!
En route to the third and final lake, we ran across a small “gator hole” containing a brood of baby alligators, each no longer than my hand! As much as I wanted to get a closer look, the thick black mud surrounding the pool, and the possibility of the mother’s return, dissuaded me. The last place you want to be when an irate mother gator storms out of the brush is stuck in thigh-deep mud next to her babies! Nearby, we found a little Eastern Narrowmouth Toad (Gastrophryne carolinensis) – my first ever sighting of this species.
Lizard tail (Saururus cernuus) in a dense bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) strand.
Throughout our swamp trek, we made our way through some spectacular stands of bald cypress and pond apple. Surrounded by abundant plant life in the densely shaded understory, the heavy air filled with the songs of Northern Parulas, White-eyed Vireos, and the occasional Barred Owl, I really got a sense of what all of South Florida must have been like before the landscape bore the scars of human exploitation. Big Cypress National Preserve is truly a remarkable piece of Florida’s natural heritage, and I can’t wait to explore it further.