As with many writers, I have a little routine that I follow. I wake up early in the morning, get myself a cup of coffee, go up to my office, and sit down at my computer to gather my thoughts before I start typing. This week I have done my best to repeat all of these, but there is one key difference: I am not at home. Instead, I write to you from an airy screened-in porch in Florida.
Surprisingly, some of the birds here are quite familiar. Just now as I paused to appreciate my surroundings I saw a blue jay fly by. Off to the north a male cardinal is singing and earlier a trio of starlings came sauntering through the yard, poking and prodding the lawn for insects. And here’s a red-bellied woodpecker, too! So far, I could be describing my own yard.
But then there are the palm trees growing just outside the screens. As I write, a limpkin is stalking the shoreline for snails and other small delectables that might be hiding in the shallow water. And now, coming in from the east, a great blue heron skims over the glassy surface of the pond, occasionally leaving little rings of ripples where it has touched the water with its wingtips. I am definitely in a new place.
All I have to do is wake up and step outside to find myself surrounded by exotic species that I can normally find only in the pages of a field guide. To see dazzling displays of Nature’s finest species, however, I have to leave this carefully manicured setting and head out to an entirely different manmade environment. Fortunately, my mother-in-law lives just a few miles from two magnificent oases for birds: the Wakodahatchee wetlands, and the Green Cay Nature Center. Since Green Cay is the setting for today’s story, I’ll save a description of Wakodahatchee for later.
Green Cay is a large, manmade wetland complex that was so expertly designed that you feel as though you are adrift in the natural world. Open water stretches for hundreds of yards across the center of a long, winding circle of elevated boardwalk. Emergent plants are everywhere and in them you can find all sorts of birds, reptiles and amphibians. This is a fantastic place for photographing birds in flight because you can see them coming from a great distance and they never fly too high over the water.
A paradise for nature photographers, Green Cay is also the very real world in which many of these animals spend their entire lives. I thought of this as I was packing for my trip because one of the things I had to pack was the idea for this column. So it was in the comfort of my home office, while the mercury dipped below 32 degrees outside, that I selected the pictures that complemented the story I am going to tell today. It’s a story that I saw snippets of back in 2013.
I was at Green Cay enjoying my fourth consecutive day of nature photography. I had arrived in time to see the sunrise and I was able to capture a photo that really captured a sense of place. Cypress trees populate a low island and the water is covered with patches of duckweed. Tall clumps of emergent vegetation spring up here and there and the boardwalk snakes around behind all of it. A sumptuous golden light illuminates the scene from an extremely low angle, but the dark clouds of a moody tropical morning can be seen overhead. Glorious!
I continued down the boardwalk and found myself in the right place at the right time to see a huge alligator. Nature cooperated again and one of those dark clouds passed in front of the sun. I had time to reposition myself and capture a wonderful low-angle shot that may be my best alligator photo to date.
The presence of alligators made me wonder how it was possible that there were any birds in the water at all. Wouldn’t they all be snapped up in the blink of an eye? Whatever the danger may be, multitudes of birds are willing to take the risk in order to find their own food. Still, what must it be like to live a life that contains the very real possibility of a sneak attack from under the surface of the water that you so desperately need for your own survival?
Well, I found evidence of that danger just a little farther down the boardwalk. I found a snowy egret perched on the railing, and since I hadn’t had much luck getting photos of snowy egrets, I focused all of my attention on taking the perfect shot. Nice posture, eye in focus, click. Another success! What I didn’t realize until much later is exactly what I had taken a photo of.
I was back at base camp (Fran’s house) and going through my photos when I realized that this bird had suffered a devastating injury. It seems to me that the only cause of such an injury had to be an alligator. This bird must have been stalking the shallows for fish when an alligator suddenly grabbed it by the leg. As the frightened bird struggled to get away from the alligator sharp teeth sank into thin flesh and peeled skin from bone.
The alligator must have tried to adjust its grip and in that split second the egret got away. The bird escaped immediate death, but not death itself. The egret’s foot was dislocated and only skin and tendon held it in place. Weakened by such an injury, the poor creature would certainly die, perhaps even finally falling victim to another alligator.
As I sit here telling this macabre story a wood stork is poking for food in a littoral zone to my right and snowy egrets have been passing back and forth for over an hour. A mother duck and her ducklings paddled by and no alligators surfaced to swallow the entire family. Most of the birds are fine. I am halfway through my visit, I have taken more than 4,000 photos, and I have many stories to share, but they will have to wait until I get home. For now, enjoy the peepers and get ready for more birds from the south. I’ve seen common yellowthroats and gray catbirds, which means they will be up north soon.
Bill Danielson has worked as a naturalist for 16 years. In that time, he has been a national park ranger, a wildlife biologist and a field researcher. He currently works as a high school chemistry and biology teacher. To contact Bill, or to learn more about his writing, visit: www.speakingofnature.com.