Everglades Animals
Birds
Warblers
All sorts of warblers make pit stops in the Everglades on their migrating routes up and down South and North America. They see the hammock islands sticking out from the sawgrass river, and touch down in oak branches.
Types of Warblers stopping in the Florida Everglades
- myrtle warblers
- pine warblers
- palm warblers
- redstart warblers
- black-throated warblers
- black-and-white warblers
Pelicans
These crafty loping giant birds are of course prevalent near the water in Florida Bay, and also the ocean. You’ll also find them in the inland bays, waiting for fish, scooping them up into their large lips. Their wingspans are up to ten feet wide, and swarm around in groups, landing like gangsters on the banks of water areas, ready for the fish-hunt.
Mammals
Panther
Panthers hardly exist anymore in the Florida Everglades, their habitat having dwindled with the drainage of the region, the development of the land, and the reduction of their prey. There are just a few left, and they are now protected.
Panthers dig for turtle eggs and hunt for brown deer. The Florida Panter is light brown colored, not black. In addition to their destruction via loss of habitat, lots of them were killed by cars at night, when the road through the Everglades was finally built, in the twentieth century. Settlers who tried to develop farms hated the panther, who came around at night to eat their animals, such as hogs. The farmer-settlers shot them with rifles and hunted the panther with dogs. Fighting back, the panther earned a reputation as a fierce killer animal.
Deer
The deer in the Everglades feed on vegetation throughout the everglades hammocks, and are brown colored, with white tails.
Raccoons and Otters
Otters live in cypress swamps, or rather cypress pools, as well as everywhere else in the Everglades, since they love water habitats. They are everywhere in the Everglades, and there are lots of them. They are one of the oldest inhabitants of the Everglades, and they are perfectly adapted for the conditions of this area. Their fur is extra oily and he loves being wet. His paws are heavily webbed, and very adept at navigating the watery ways of the Everglades. Otters are quick and alert, so alligators dont’ usually pose a problem for them, since they can dart away if something feels dangerous. He thrives in the sun and plays in the water. You’ll see them in the canals, too, swimming up the murky waters on their way to new spots to explore.
Raccoons are nocturnal, and are also found everywhere in the Everglades. They are opportunistic animals, which means they are curious, ready for any opportunity for food. There are thousands and thousands of them, eating fish, oysters, crawfish, sea grapes, anything they can find.
Bears
Bears in Florida are black, and they dig for turtle eggs, among other things. They also forage for crabs and they’ll eat birds’ eggs if they happen to stumble upon them. Like bears everywhere, they burrow in the undergrowth of forested areas, overturning logs in search of grubs and mice nests. And of course they eat berries when they find them!
Alligators and Crocodiles
Alligators
Unlike crocodiles, Alligators have round noses, and live in fresh water. They need wet conditions for their eggs, which is also totally different from the crocs. They lay their eggs in piles of weeds and grass they’ve collected, and which steams in the sun, creating ideal alligator egg conditions.
Crocodiles
Crocodiles are more brownish colored, unlike the darker, almost black alligators. Croc jaws are narrower than those of alligators. They’re also faster than alligators. Crocodiles need dry, sandy conditions in which to lay their eggs, so you’ll find that they lay their eggs on beaches.
Snakes and Insects
Here are some of the snakes and insects you’ll find in the Everglades:
- Coral Snake
- Scorpion
- Tree Snails
- Butterflies
- Grasshoppers
- Dragonflies
- Palmetto Bugs
- Walking Sticks
Life in the Water
Manatees
Endangaered, manatees have mostly to watch out for modern development. They like man-made canals, swimming into them in the colder winter months for their warmer water. They forage for vegetables along the edges, eating mangrove leaves, and sometimes find themselves near boat propellors which cause injury and death. An agressive campaign of warning and reminder signs posted in boating areas, harbors, canals, etc, has helped raise public awareness of this problem.
The latin name is Trichechus manatus, and the grey manatee is also called the West Indian Manatee. And of course it’s also been called the Sea Cow. They are indeed enormous, getting to be over a thousand pounds and up to thirteen feet long. They have very thick skin and adorable large eyes. With their sweet demeanor and sociable habits, they are tug at the heart strings of most people who come to know them. Learning about their endangered status and the threat that boat propellors cause to manatees, causes people to want to support their cause. The manatees who find man-made canals with residents and boats on them, find that people on docks will give them food or fresh water from a hose, and lose any natural fear they may have, of people or of boats, or anything bigger than themselves. They aren’t naturally fearful of much, since there aren’t many predators who can handle these large vegetarian beings.
Everglades Ecology
There are no Other Everglades in the World
A Heron in the Everglades
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, chronicler and advocate for survival of the Florida Everglades, began her groundbreaking book The Everglades, River of Grass, with the statement, “There are no other Everglades in the world.” She describes the Everglades as vast, remote, and hardly known. At the time she wrote this, in the 1940′s, this was definitely true, and even today, with scientific studies, conservation efforts, and modern understanding of ecology and water systems, it still seems that the Everglades are hardly known; that is, to most people.Historically speaking, the term Everglades means the entire central region of the South Florida peninsula from Lake Okeechobee down to Florida Bay. Today, as you can see from any map, The Everglades occupies about one-third of this. Florida history and politics have combined to create the modified ecological sytem we have in Everglades National Park today, which is a reduced and controlled version of the original River of Grass.
Everglades History
The Glades People
The first known people to inhabit the rough terrain of The Florida Everglades were what we now call American Indians, or previously known as just Indians by the white settlers who first encountered them. Really, anyone who lives in the Everglades is one of the Glades People, but the only groups of humans ever to have been able to adapt the harsh conditions were various tribes of Native Americans, who came here thousands of years ago across the Bering Sea
and down through North American, over to the Florida Peninsula. Anthropologists have found pottery from kitchen middens as old as 900 A.D. Middens from around 1200 A.D. begin to reveal knives made from shark teeth. This was an improvement over the conch shell tools they’d formerly used. With the advent of shark-tooth knives, the Glades People were able to craft many new items for daily living. With their new knives, they could:
- carve animal bones into hairpins, to make their distinctive pony tail hairdos for men
- carve bones into pendants, which are unique to the Everglades people.
How to Live in the Everglades
Over the hundreds of years that have been documented in the social history of The Everglades, no group of white settlers has been able to adapt and survive in this region without drastically altering the terrain, to the detriment of the land. Tribes of American Indians such as Calusa, Mikasuki, Tekestas, and the Mayaimis, were able to adapt and survive where no other people could even visit, much less inhabit.
One major factor of life in the Everglades was (and still is) mosquitos. Everglades have large masses of water that don’t move, which as we all know is perfect breeding environment for mosqitos. Early on, Glades people learned that building smudge fires kept the mosqitos at bay, as well as other insects of the Everglades: sand flies.
The made tools with what they found in the area, mostly at first conch shells, as mentioned above. As you can imagine, digging or cutting anything with a conch shell, no matter how matter how hard you worked to sharpen the edge, was inferior to the later development of using shark teeth as blades. New tools opened a whole new world of possibilities for the Native American people of the Glades, and the shark tooth became an important cultural tool as well as a symbol of their ingenuity.
The Glades people developed their culture and invented their tools and adornments, their solutions to daily life in the Everglades, and slowly became different from the American Indians who settled more north, along the rivers of Florida, the rivers which fed into Okeechobee and which flowed out from it. Lake Kissimmee would be one area where River people developed differently from Glades people. The different types of tribes did trade with each other, however, as they developed canoe routes amongst the saw grasss. The Glades people used their shark tooth knives to dig great canoes from the big cypress trees that grew in the swamps above the everglades area.
As the different tribes in southern Florida dug in and developed their cultures through the decades, and as they established trading routes, they learned from each other, carrying cultural information along trade routes. One thing the Glades people learned from the river people was new ways of dealing with the dead.