After leaving the Flamingo Visitor Center area we wanted to visit all of the boardwalk trails on our way back up the park road. Our next stop was the West Lake Trail, marked on the map with a yellow arrow.
All throughout the park there are canoe trails and canoe campgrounds that look like they would be a lot of fun to come back to. The West Lake trail head is the start to one of these trails, but it also has a short boardwalk hike down to the lake. Unfortunately the boardwalk down at the lake end was destroyed in a hurricane, so you couldn't complete the loop. But the walk was still beautiful and we saw lots of really cool plants and animals.
We also spent some time in the parking lot messing with camera settings and getting great pictures of a crow.
The next stop up the road was the Mahogany Hammock, the light green arrow on the map. "Hammocks" are everywhere in Florida. They are little "islands" of trees that pop up in a very different ecosystem, usually due to a small change in elevation in a wetland. The area around this hammock is marl prairie which is basically a flooded grassland. Unlike other places around the park that are sloughs, the water here doesn't flow, it just slowly sinks back into the ground. The marl prairie is full of sawgrass and periphyton which help nourish fish that live in the area.
Once you get into the hammock itself the environment changes completely and becomes more like a dense jungle.
There are several very cool plants plants in the hammock, including multiple species of bromeliad. Although pineapples are in the bromeliad family, most of the bromeliads in the everglades are "air plants." They live in clumps on the sides of other trees, often catching water in their leaves. They often have beautiful flowers, but we were not in the right season to see them blooming.
One of the most interesting plants in the hammock is the strangler fig. While most plants have their fertilized sprouts start in the ground and grow up, the strangler fig actually works in reverse. The sprouts land on an already established tree and then sends roots down until they find the forest floor. Eventually these roots can cover the entire host tree and effective box the other tree out, tacking its place in the canopy.
After Mahogany Hammock we headed up the Pa-Hay-Okee overlook, the dark green arrow on the map. This boardwalk features an elevated overlook to look out of the "river of grass" in the Shark River Slough that everglades is known for. In contrast to the marl prairie above the waters in this slough are steadily flowing south down to the ocean, although from above it almost looks like a dry prairie. Somehow, we didn't seem to take any pictures on this trail.
As you can see on the map at the top, we made three more stops on the way out of the park. However this post is already getting long and it's getting to be time to leave the library. So it looks like our singe day in the south entrance of Everglades will be coming to you in three parts. Stay tuned!
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