The Quack Pack Hits The Road: Everglades - Flamingo Visitor Center Area

Everglades National Park is the third largest national park outside of Alaska, tenth overall because the Alaskan parks are huge. There are three ways to access the park, two of them of them are in the northern section of the park and we skipped past them in order to do them on the way back out. Instead we took a day to drive in to the southern entrance and along the longer road into the park.

As you can see on the map, there are a ton of different ecosystems in the park. Southern Florida is very very flat. The highest point in the 1.5 million acre park is 20 feet, and every inch of that elevation makes a huge difference in the ecosystem.

We started by driving the entire road down to the far visitor center, Flamingo (red arrow on the map). The Flamingo visitor center has a marina and is the main place where the park meets the sea. The center itself was badly damaged in 2017 by hurricane Irma and they currently operating out of a temporary trailer while they fix the building.

Southern Florida is the only place in the world that has both crocodiles and alligators. They don't actually live "together" because alligators live in fresh water, while crocodiles prefer the brackish water in the mangroves, but they are living very close to one another. Aside from where they are living there are a couple of ways to tell them apart. The easiest is to look at their head shape.

Alligator Skull on the left, Crocodile on the right.

Alligators have much boxier skulls that extend more or less straight out to their snout. The upper jaw of the alligator is wider than the lower jaw so their teeth are hidden when their mouth is closed. The crocodile, on the other hand, has a very V-shaped skull and their upper and lower jaws are the same width, resulting in a "toothy grin" appearance when their mouths are closed.

Alligators are much more common southern Florida. We saw tons of the them all over Big Cypress as well is in both the southern and northern sections of Everglades. We were pretty lucky to get to also see one crocodile hanging out in the Marina next to the Flamingo visitor center.

We also got to see some Manatees swimming around in the marina. Unfortunately the water was very murky so they were hard to see, and ever harder to take good pictures of. It was still fun to see them though. They were swimming around each other very playfully and one of the rangers said that it was part of a mating ritual.