I decided to spend today at Everglades National Park, at the southern tip of the state.  Last year my experiences here were mixed.  I had the most luck last year at Eco Pond, which is located deep within the Everglades.  The Everglades are enormous, and it can take quite a while to drive through them.  From Miami you’ll want to drive to the town of Homestead and then follow the signs to Everglades NP.  This will take you to the East entrance.  From this entrance you’ll have access to many sites within the park, including the famous Anhinga Trail.  The map below shows the sites I visited this year:


The first site after entering at the East gate is the Anhinga Trail, which is a world-famous destination for birders and bird photographers.  Last year I got a few good shots here, though I found the site to be a bit too “sticky” for my tastes (meaning that the scenery featured lots of distracting branches and leaves, making it difficult to get striking shots in which the bird stands out starkly from its background).  This year I faced several additional issues.
    First, when I drove in to the parking lot I noticed signs that read:


The local vulture flock has apparently developed a habit of ripping out the rubber moulding around windows and sun roofs of cars—but only at the Anhinga Trail (not elsewhere in the Everglades).  I actually observed a posse of the birds moving from vehicle to vehicle, pecking here and there and very probably scratching up the paint as they scurried over roof and hood.  A ranger informed me that several ranger trucks had been severely damaged, and he’d seen visitors who’d had thousands of dollars worth of damage done to their vehicles.  The rangers had hung up a few dead vultures to scare away the flock, but it didn’t work. 
    In order to protect the window moulding in my car I decided to keep all the windows rolled up.  That meant I couldn’t leave my dog in the car while I birded the boardwalk (dogs are allowed in the park, but not on some of the trails, including the Anhinga trail).  So I tied her up beneath a tree next to my car.  She’s old, so she happily took a nap there in the shade.  However, as I headed toward the trail and looked back I saw that the vultures had started gathering around my baby.  Soon she was surrounded by them.  Since she’s too old and gentle to attack them, they were able to get within about two feet of her.  I don’t know if they were waiting for her to die, but they definitely seemed strangely interested in her.  I mentioned this to the park ranger and he voluntarily went out and chased the vultures around the parking lot until they left my dog alone for a while, so I could do some birding.  I didn’t stray very far from the parking lot, however, and I checked on her frequently.
    The other issue I encountered that day was a general lack of birds.  A well-known bird photographer that I ran into at the beginning of the trail said he had done the trail already and it was dead.  I got a few shots of a gallinule (see below), but that was about it.


I didn’t stay long.  I was too worried the vultures might come back and try to eat my dog or my window moulding, so I left and started the long drive to the southern end of the Everlades, where I’d had the most luck last year.
    I first stopped at a site called Flamingo.  No, there aren’t any flamingos there, but last year I’d had great luck with the ospreys that nest here.  Though I did find several osprey nests, and ospreys were ever-present and quite vocal, I didn’t get any good shots of them, and I soon became impatient to move on to another site that had been hugely productive last year.  That site is called Eco Pond, and is just a bit further down the road from Flamingo.
    Unfortunately, Eco Pond was a huge disappointment.  The water level was much higher this year, so there were no mud flats and hence no shorebirds.  Also, there was at least one gator present, and a fellow I ran into at the pond informed me that the Pigmy Rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius barbouri) was commonly encountered at this location.  He described the snake as highly aggressive (occasionally chasing people for short distances) and its venom as highly toxic.  I decided that lying on my belly at the pond’s edge in hopes of getting eye-level shots of birds wasn’t such a great idea after all.  All I’d seen so far were a couple of little blue herons, a wood stork, a couple of snowy egrets, a green heron, and a tricolored.  None of these subjects offered a good angle.  Some very mediocre snapshots of the tricolored are shown below:


I decided to get back on the road and head north toward some of the sites I’d not yet explored.  I fortuitously stopped at Mrazek Pond, where I quickly found a yellow-crowned night heron right at the edge of the pond, mere feet from the highway.  The bird was extremely cooperative for a long time.  Other birders stopped and watched the bird hunting.  Several of them pulled out cell-phone cameras, and I’d bet they probably got some reasonably good images even with those.

Though there were some birds visible on the far shore of the pond, they were too far even for my 840mm lens (600mm with 1.4× teleconverter), so I continued to watch the yellow-crown:

CLICK TO ZOOM
CLICK TO ZOOM

When the bird tired of its audience it flew off and I decided to give my dog a break.  I took her to the campground at the southernmost terminus of the Everglades, where she swam in the warm water while I scanned for dolphins.  On the way there I stopped to chase a red-shouldered hawk, and instead got a decent image of a wintering palm warbler:


I also spotted a swallow-tailed kite flying around, but the bird stayed a considerable distance away, and all I was able to get was a fairly undetailed shot:


When my dog had done enough swimming I started the long drive back toward the park exit.  At one point I noticed an osprey perched on a branch above the road, and stopped to shoot it.  I then continued on my way toward the park exit and decided to stop at a trail called Mahogany Hammock.  Some visitors who were leaving informed me that some recently-fledged barred owl chicks were perched a short distance along the trail.  I quickly found the birds, one of which is shown below:



It’s worthwhile noting here that in the failing light I had to use fairly strong flash to get this owl photo.  I’d later read an article on bird vision which informed me that flash photography is generally not harmful to birds when the flash is used for “fill flash” in daylight conditions, but that the use of flash as main light in near-dark conditions can possibly (it’s thought) temporarily daze the bird, much as it would a human.  For that reason, I’ve decided not to take these types of photos anymore.  If I’d known that at this time, I wouldn’t have taken this owl shot at all.  Though the bird didn’t seem to be bothered by my flash, I’d rather err on the side of respecting the bird.
    Given the slim pickings encountered today, I decided that I’m done with the Everglades for this year—or at least with this part of the Everglades.  Tomorrow I’m thinking I’ll hit Shark Valley, a northern Everglades site on the road to Naples.  Though I wasn’t entirely happy with Shark Valley last year (it’s very “sticky”, much like the Anhinga Trail), I’ve been hearing good things from other photographers about the birdiness of that site this year.