I was so surprised to see all the tall buildings in Miami. There are taller buildings, and more of them, than in Columbus, OH! How is this possible? Miami is on a beach so wouldn't it be impossible to build skyscrapers on sand? (Keep reading my logs for the answer to this quandary.)
It's been two long, grueling, yet exciting days of orientation.
I went to Everglades National Park and saw two alligators: one floating in the water and another with just its eye poking out of a gator hole. When we got off the bus I was amazed at the humidity! I started sweating the moment I got off the bus! I was expecting the heat and humidity but I was completely surprised about the rest of the picture.
It was pretty dry and there wasn't as much water as I had anticipated.
So here's what I learned about the Everglades...
It was established in 1947 and it is 240 miles long. It's an ecosystem stretching from Lake Okeechobee (O-key-cho-bee) to the Florida Keys. Most national parks are set aside because of their scenery or cultural treasures. The Everglades is probably the only national park that was created for neither of these reasons. It was established to protect plants and animals, but most importantly the orchids and bromeliad plants. The Everglades are the only place in the world where you'll see a mix of temperate and tropical wildlife to such an extent. You can see plants from the Ohio Valley and the Caribbean there. It's also the only place in the world with the alligator and crocodile coexist. It also has a lot a designations including: World Heritage Site and Biosphere Preserve (sorry, I didn't get the rest of them).
There are two seasons in the Everglades: the wet season and the dry season. The area receives 55-60 inches of rain with 80% of that rain falling within a four month time period! That's almost as much rain as I am tall! I wonder how this compares to the amounts of rainfall (or really "precipitation" because there's snow up North) that fall in New York and Ohio every year?
During the summer months lots of rain falls in Lake Okeechobee and the area of the Everglades. Plus there's naturally occurring hurricanes that drop a lot of water on the area all at once. The lake floods and instead of the water flowing south through a nice orderly river with nicely defined river banks along its sides, the Kissimmee River, which is only a foot or two deep, also floods and the water spreads out into what is called "a river of grass" that is probably close to 85 miles wide meandering all through southern Florida creating a summer swampland where the alligators and crocodiles happily play…well, maybe sleep. The mosquito fish traverse the wide rivers from the Keys to Lake Okeechobee and happily gobble up, you guessed it, mosquitoes. The orchids and bromeliad grow peacefully in the tropical humidly.
In the winter, there is no rainfall so the 85 mile-wide river of grass slowly dries up to a width of about 5% it's width in the summer. (Hmmm…if the river of grass is 85 miles wide in the summer, how wide would it be in the winter?) The annual loss in habitat forces the huge number of mosquito fish to compete for resources. This makes it incredibly easy for bird to catch food (fish) because they don't really have to look for it. The fish are literally in plain site.
Imagine looking for 10 chocolate bars on your block. Now imagine looking for 10 chocolate bars in your bedroom. Which would you prefer if you had a chocolate craving? Why? Now imagine the birds who crave fish instead of chocolate bars.
This is one reason why so many birds call the Everglades their winter home. Hmm…maybe this phenomenon is the origin of the term "snowbird:" a person who spends the winter months in Florida.
Lake Okeechobee is the sixth largest freshwater lake in North America. Can you figure out the five biggest?
Okay, well, that was how everything USED to work until about the early 1900's, I'd say. Then PEOPLE started moving to Southern Florida en masse. (There were people in the Everglades before then but they did not impact the land nearly to the extent that people to today.) People needed the water for so many things: drinking, farming, and tourism just to name a few. They sought to control the river by creating two channels to divert the water for those purposes. Now only 18% of the water reaches the Everglades compared to "back in the day." Of course this really affects plant and wildlife because it changes the composition of the swamp; but how? What do you think?