’Gators,
Grackles and Great company...
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Week One - The Everglades
It all started when Pam & Ian Akhurst deserted the delights of Surrey (how could they?!) in the summer of 2000. Ian’s work with Barclay’s Bank required them to relocate to Miami. Pam’s son, Rhodri, took the change to an American education in his stride; Pam wasn’t allowed to work in the States, but soon found ways to keep herself busy in the local community, Rhodri’s school, the church and the choir; and the Akhursts’ British friends and relations soon discovered the benefits of having generous and willing hosts on the other side of the Atlantic.
So after much planning and re-jigging of diaries (including moving the APCM), we finally left the Rectory on Easter Monday, the first of April. This was a great day to be leaving... the clocks had gone forward by an hour the previous day - in time for the Easter Vigil to start at what was effectively 5am - and after the usual excitement and busy-ness of Holy Week, we were not a little exhausted to begin with. Heather’s taxi service got us to Heathrow airport (only one return to the house, three minutes down the road, to collect Selwyn’s sunglasses) for our 10am check-in; the American Airlines flight finally left at 12.30, just 35 minutes late; and off we went.
Around ten hours later, we were finally in Miami airport. The heat and humidity hit us as we stepped into the car park, and we were soon to get used to the odd sensation of rising temperature when you step outside the car or building - and the necessity of constant air-conditioning. And finally, we were in Pam & Ian’s wonderful house, with its eyrie of an office for Ian up a spiral staircase, incredibly high ceilings, and windows on all sides - complete with canal running round the outside of the garden, iguanas and wonderful birdlife, palm trees, a swimming pool…
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| Pam & Ian's pool |
We succeeded in staying awake until 9pm, by which time (this being 3am in the UK) we’d been up for 21 hours.
No time to laze about, though. The following day was the start of a brief holiday for Ian, and we were all off to the Everglades - a wonderful area of mangrove swamps and wildlife down to the south-west. We were staying in the Ivey House Hotel (bed & breakfast) in Everglades City, and from here we had a wonderful five days.
Corkscrew Swamp is an amazing "wildlife preserve". The boardwalk took us past all manner of birds. Several types of heron: the Great Blue, the Little Blue, the Tri-coloured, the Night and the Green. There were egrets, ibis, owls; and a white-eyed virio, like a finch, who (deliberately, I think) defeated my best efforts at capturing him on film! A telescope was trained on the nest containing the osprey and her chick; beautiful airplants were in the trees; and, of course, alligators in the lake.
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| Egret | Airplant | 'Gator | Little Blue Heron |
There had been a heavy cloudburst on our arrival (finished in ten minutes and dried up in fifteen), but this made the walk only more atmospheric through the trees hung with Spanish moss. This lovely day was concluded with a tremendous sunset on the way back to the B&B - great opportunity to use up lots of film.
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| Everglades Sunset |
We went kayaking, too - yes, honestly! Our guide, Bobby, took us and another family first on a brief “hike” – more of an amble, really – through some of the local forestland, where we identified puma tracks and saw an alligator skeleton.
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| Hunting a woozle |
A slow drive down the side of a creek showed us red-shouldered hawks, ospreys, many more alligators, and several more herons.
Our expedition had been planned in some freshwater areas, but the lack of recent rain made it too dry, so instead we went to Halfway Creek, which is brackish – half-and-half salt and fresh water. Murder on the contact lenses… A vividly hot, blue day, totally still and quiet, paddling over five miles through the mangrove swamps. Very little wildlife around on this occasion, in fact – we didn’t have to beat the ‘gators off with the paddles – but a beautiful and unmissable experience. This trip was mostly responsible for our sunburn…
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| Selwyn | Cassie | Ian | The gang |
We realised that, whilst in the USA, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity of meeting some of our friends over there. The first such meeting was with Bob & Erica Adams. Bob is a (very, very) distant relative of Selwyn’s – his mother was a Tillett; so we met for lunch in Fort Myers, and had a lovely time swapping stories. It was a real delight to meet them, after so many e-mails exchanged over genealogical research.
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| Erica, Selwyn & Bob |
That same evening, we returned to Everglade City via Naples. No similarity to its European equivalent! It felt most like a giant Covent Garden, with extraordinarily lovely and (mostly) expensive shops; a beach full of surfers and “beautiful people” (and a strong wind which threatened all the hats); and, finally, down to Tin City for supper, which is a boardwalked “mall” full of music, cafes and gifts. It was there that we treated ourselves to a wooden egret, who now is a permanent reminder of one of our favourite sights.
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| Our wooden egret |
Another very special memento was an poster of the photography of Clyde Butcher, whose Big Cypress Gallery is in the Everglades. His large-format black-and-white photos of the wilder parts of Florida are simply stunning, capturing an extraordinarily beautiful place.
We also took a boat trip out to the “ten thousand islands” – little patches of land across a huge amount of water – for more of our favourite wildlife. Here I succeeded in photographing an osprey with his lunch between his claws; and, better still, we saw our dolphins. The dark shapes ahead came closer, and suddenly there were three of them, leaping from the water in perfect synchronisation – showing off something terrible, of course. I managed to catch just one of them on film; it was a very moving experience to see these gorgeous creatures.
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| Osprey with his lunch | One of our dolphins |
Before leaving the Everglades, we had one particularly special treat: a night-time airboat ride, booked specially for Pam’s birthday. Joined by their Australian friends Amanda and Ken, we left at sunset with our guide, Johnny Tigertail, who is one of the Miccosukee Indian tribe. (We’d also visited the Miccosukee village earlier that day – didn’t much enjoy the spectacle of alligator-wrestling, though.)
The speed and noise of the airboat, rushing over the swamps, is an incredible experience – you have to wear ear-muffs! We went to the “hammock” (a sort of village on stilts) which has belonged to Johnny’s family for many years to see the sunset, hear about the lives of the Indians, and to meet Mama-gator – the alligator who has known Johnny all her life, and comes to his call to be fed hot-dogs…
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| Mama-gator | In the Miccosukee hammock | Sunset over the swamps |
Then it was back onto the airboat in the dark, Johnny having put a miner’s lamp arrangement on his head, in order to pick out the eyes of the ‘gators in the swamp. Which he did. We paused every so often to watch these wonderful creatures, ranging from fully-grown brutes of about 10 feet, down to babies of about six inches long.
We stopped in one place, and Johnny scooped his hand into the water, bringing up a tiny baby ‘gator (having first used a special “call” to check that Mama wasn’t around), who was then passed around the boat. Once he’d got used to the idea, the little fellow seemed quite happy to be examined and shown to the cameras.
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| Rhodri with the baby 'gator | |
The birds, of course, were all asleep by now, but we did see one heron that raised his head very suddenly in the spotlight, looking deeply indignant that we’d woken him up!
Click here for week two...