Big, Wild, and Connected

Part 1: From the Florida Peninsula to the Coastal Plain

John Davis, Wildlands Wildlands Network, Wildlands Network

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781597264891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610914413
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This E-ssential is a three-part series that covers John Davis's epic journey from Florida to Maine. In 2011, with support from the Wildlands Network, Davis traveled 7,600 miles in 10 months from Florida to Maine by foot, bicycle, skis, and canoe/kayak. His extensive travels were motivated by wanting to answer the question “Is it possible in the twenty-first century to identify and protect a continental-long wildlife corridor that could help to protect eastern nature into the future?”

John paints a vivid picture of the physical challenges of the trek, such as climbing the highest point in South Carolina with a heavily loaded bike and trying to consume the 8,000 calories per day he needed to fuel himself for the journey. As readers adventure with Davis, they will also share his evolving understanding of what it would take to implement an Eastern Wildway.

Eastern wildlife, both seen and unseen, from Florida panthers to North Carolina’s red wolves to the ghosts of cougars farther north, are the real focus of this adventure as John explores how such wildness can coexist with human development in the most populated regions of the United States. The science and conservation of large-scale connectivity are brought to life by his travels—offering unique insights into the challenges and opportunities for creating an Eastern Wildway. This is a must-read for enthusiasts of hiking narratives, as well as professionals and students interested in issues related to large-scale connectivity. Compelling photographs and other graphics complement John’s fascinating story.

CHAPTER ONE

Where the Panther Still Prowls

Greater Everglades Ecosystem, Florida

February, 2011; brilliant subtropical winter sun most of the month as I zigzagged north through southern and central Florida; paddling gentle until winds picked up; flat, easy riding except when winds opposed me; level-but-often-wet hiking; one hard rain; biting insects occasionally mean.

A gentle giant surfaced as I set out to scout an Eastern Wildway. The manatee watched as friends and I kayaked into the waters off North Key Largo, seeming to join nearby dolphins and fish and seabirds in wishing us success in our quest to explore and promote a continental conservation corridor, a safe passage for travelers wild and human.

Wildlands friends and I felt warmly received here at the beginning of what we thought would be a 4,500-mile (but turned into a 7,500-mile) meandering journey to and through the remaining wilds of the East. Reporters and photographers were there at the launch, so I suppressed the tears welling up as I saw Florida’s most emblematic sea mammal, the manatee, whose order, Sirenia, hints at the allure these graceful vegetarians of the sea have on wayfarers.

TrekEast began, then, as an Eastern Conservation Corridor will begin, with a network of friends gathering where the manatee and dolphin meet the Key Largo wood rat and gumbo limbo tree, and the panther prowls nearby, while egrets and herons spearfish the teeming waters. Among the friends must be, my Wildlands Network colleagues realized from the start, people who can help get the words and images of natural connections out far and wide. The launch site on North Key Largo chosen by Wildlands Network was ideal for its abundance of wildlife and paddling and snorkeling opportunities but also its ease of access for reporters and well-wishers.

An Eastern Wildway, I hoped to find, may grow from the Sunshine State. Florida’s limestone bedrock, pellucid springs, and subtropical climate give it the richest species diversity in eastern North America, even after centuries of roughhousing by Euro-American settlers. Moreover, despite waves of rust-belt refugees moving in over the past few decades, Florida comes closest in the eastern United States to having a full guild of top predators and a viable wildlife habitat reserve system. In my hundreds of miles of exploring Florida, I was seldom more than a few miles from remnants of original ecosystems—forest, savanna, marsh, prairie, coral reef, and sea—which are not yet too badly sundered to reconnect. Florida’s protected area system is not finished—it’s not big enough or continuous enough—but it’s a good start, a well-watered ground upon which an Eastern Conservation Corridor can be restored, a stronghold from which the panther can recolonize much of its original range across the East, if America finally finds the wisdom and the will to weave back together our precious natural heritage.

A common question as I began my long trek was how I’d trained for it, and my answer was a bit embarrassing: I’ve never really trained and probably would not know how. I consider myself a social runner and lifter—a few times a year, when invited by friends, I’ll jog or lift weights with them. More often, I trot through the woods simply as part of getting somewhere quickly, and I effectively lift weights when chopping firewood, rowing across Lake Champlain, or climbing trees or rocks. That is, I try to propel myself wherever I can, rather than relying on petroleum, and enjoy natural recreation—hiking, cross-country skiing, skating, climbing, paddling, bicycling. My lifelong preference for muscle-powered movement has generally kept me fit. Maybe saying something about my inner character, my recurring nightmare is of paralysis, whereas my recurring liberation dream is of leaping to a tree branch and effortlessly pulling myself up with either arm (in real life, the best I’ve ever done is one right-arm pull-up on a bar).

My other recurring happy dream is of seeing a panther. Often in the dream, the panther appears almost willfully, as if we both meant to find each other. TrekEast was partly a journey to see what it would take to allow the panther (or cougar, or puma, or mountain lion, or catamount or, scientifically, Puma concolor … many names, one great cat) to reclaim much of its original range across the East, or even to imagine how a hypothetical lineage of panthers might venture out of Florida and safely make their way north through the Southeast Coastal Plain and Appalachian Mountains, to eventually become neighbors, not just in dreams, in the Adirondacks and northern Appalachians. As I moved north, this became the question I asked myself: How might a panther move through this region?

Birds seemed to be everywhere during the paddlers’ traverse of the Everglades National Park’s Wilderness Waterway, though waterfowl numbers are small fractions of what they were before the arrival in Florida of agribusiness, farther north in the watershed. (Photo courtesy of Larry Barns.)

Although it would have been wildly improbable to actually see Florida’s most charismatic and elusive land mammal, I did find tracks of panther—mother and cub—in Big Cypress National Preserve, just north of Everglades National Park, the day after my mother passed away. One of my mother’s last words, as my father told her of my safe traverse of Everglades National Park’s Wilderness Waterway, was “wonderful”; and though that word may be used too carelessly these days, in this case it was an apt summation of South Florida’s wildlife, as well as of Mary Byrd Davis’s own life.

My mother died the day before Valentine’s Day as I exited Everglades National Park and prepared to enter Big Cypress Preserve. My father reiterated my mother’s wish that I keep going, but asked that I plan to leave the trail for a few days later in the month to be with family at the funeral and to speak there about the importance of her work for wild forests. Striving to celebrate my mother’s good life rather than mourn her premature death, I rode to one of the old-growth forest stands she had catalogued in her book, Old Growth in the East: A Survey, at Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, west of Big Cypress. There a boardwalk allows thousands of visitors a year to walk through a magnificent swamp of ancient cypress trees, festooned in lichens and bromeliads and orchids, sheltering a rich understory of ferns and shrubs and herbs, holding aloft a stately bald eagle nest, and cleansing waters vibrant with wading birds, turtles, and snakes. The cheerful chatter of school kids walking in front of me, exclaiming at the huge trees, seemed to affirm my mother’s dedication to primeval forests.

Half-Dammed River of Grass

For reasons swampy and buzzing and biting, but also because of the leadership of conservationists like Marjory Stoneman Douglas (author of the classic work The Everglades: River of Grass), the Everglades ecosystem is still great and half wild. A measure of its wildness is that this is the last (and first, let us hope) refuge in the East of the panther—a cat powerful enough to kill a deer with a bite to the neck, agile enough to leap over sinkholes, yet fragile in the face of intruding humans. Panthers survived in Florida while being extirpated elsewhere in the East largely because south of Lake Okeechobee, much of Florida remains free of roads. The Greater Everglades Ecosystem, originally covering much of the southern half of peninsular Florida, is water as much as it is land. Before agribusiness, roads, and channels in the northern Everglades upset natural cycles, annual rains would flood Lake Okeechobee each summer and send massive creeping sheet flows south through the vast sawgrass meadows and past the hardwood hammocks and cypress groves to the mangroves, mudflats, and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, meaning the ground was too swampy much of the year to easily develop.

Of course, that did not stop reckless development schemes, but it did keep enough of the land and water wild that panther, bobcat, Florida black bear, Everglades mink, river otter, manatee, bottle-nosed dolphin, alligator, crocodile, eastern indigo snake, sawfish, eagles, kites, wading birds, and other sensitive creatures persisted. Red wolves were exterminated, tragically, but coyotes have moved in and are filling part of the cursorial (running) carnivore role once played by their close cousins. Deer in South Florida actually must negotiate habitats largely in response to predation pressures, from panthers, bobcats, and coyotes, whereas in much of the East these prolific browsers have little reason to fear predators and thus get portly and overabundant (see “Large Carnivores, Herbivores, and Omnivores in South Florida” in Large Carnivores and the Conservation of Biodiversity, edited by Justina C. Ray and colleagues).

In their sweeping look at remaining large roadless areas of the United States (the first such inventory since Bob Marshall’s classic wilderness study in the late 1930s), The Big Outside, Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke found the Greater Everglades Ecosystem to have more than two million roadless acres in several large blocks, putting the region at the top of the list for the East, along with the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota, and Adirondack Park in northern New York. As Dave and Howie explained, and as I would confirm along this trek, roadlessness—freedom from roads, to put it more positively—is a quality of utmost importance for land conservation. Arguably at least, the single worst thing we Americans have done to our natural heritage is build roads and drive motor vehicles on them. Roads block the movement of wide-ranging species like big cats and wolves, as well as kill untold millions of smaller animals.

Largely for these reasons—wildness and the persistence of panthers—Wildlands Network friends persuaded me to launch TrekEast in Florida; and the journey was therefore rich in wildlife from the start. Along with such charismatic creatures as manatees, dolphins, alligators, crocodiles, egrets, herons, and eagles, fellow Keys and Everglades paddlers and I saw sea slugs, needlefish, barracuda, stingray, and the unlikeliest fish I’ve ever seen, a smalltooth sawfish, looking like a big flounder with a chainsaw for a nose. These toothy sediment sweepers have been sadly diminished—in numbers and size—by overfishing and habitat loss, but still survive in Everglades bays and offshore waters. Before modern fishing took its toll, sawfish could reach twenty feet in length. We were lucky when Wildlands Network biologist Ron Sutherland spotted one about four feet in length, lurking above the sandy bottom in shallow brackish water, in a small Everglades channel bounded by thick mangroves.

John paddles a mangrove channel near North Key Largo at the start of TrekEast. Mangroves are among Earth’s most productive ecosystems. (Photo courtesy of Philip T. Lacinak.)

Land Health and Human Health: Conservation and Recreation

Everglades National Park is a great place to explore the complementary interests of recreation and conservation and the parallels between human health and ecological health. My paddling companions for that portion of the trip were Ron the biologist, photographer Larry Barns, lawyer Reg Bedell, and physical therapist Brian Trzaskos. We were all pleased the few times we met fellow paddlers—including a pair of women considerably older than us yet paddling just as fast and telling us confidently what to expect in the coming miles. We were all annoyed when motorboats roared past, oblivious of the dolphins mating in the shallow inland bays. When we were in the same canoe, Brian and I would challenge each other to find analogs from our respective realms—human health and land health—and we quickly found many. Pollution from motors is like toxic chemicals in food, we agreed; and waterways are to the land what arteries are to the body. The abundance of wildlife in the Everglades, though magnificent by modern standards, is but a shadow of its original grandeur, largely because of hydrological disruptions. How would you feel, Brian asked us, if half your blood were withdrawn from your body every year, and much of the rest was sullied with artificial chemicals?

TrekEast paddlers enjoyed many friendly encounters with birds in Everglades Wilderness Waterway. They looked out for Burmese pythons in these thicker areas but never saw any of the invasive snakes. (Photo courtesy of Larry Barns.)

Still, the allure of the Everglades stems both from its richness of wildlife and its diversity of ecosystems. As we paddled the Wilderness Waterway north through Everglades National Park, my friends and I were sometimes on huge inland bays where winds buffeted our boats and dolphins frolicked in the waves; sometimes in winding channels where gators and turtles slid off banks as we passed by; sometimes on broad sandy coast, with wading birds feeding in waters so shallow we had to drag our heavily laden boats; sometimes in mangrove tunnels, which felt as dark and damp as a tropical rainforest; just a few times by the fabled sawgrass meadows, which form the image many people have of the Everglades but are only the grassiest (or sedgiest, really) of its many ecosystems; and once on calm riverine waters with moonlight and glowing diatoms adding luminescence to the magic of the Glades after sunset.

Although we’d been kidding Ron, who studies snakes, about finding and wrestling one of the exotic pythons that have been let loose in Florida—and are decimating small mammal populations—our nearest real brush with disaster came as we forced our way along the mangrove-choked channel of Wood Creek at midtide. There, a half-submerged stick impaled my pack-canoe at water line. While bailing frantically, we tossed all the heavy gear to the other canoe and the kayak, and Larry deftly slapped tape over the hole, slowing the leak. For the next five miles, till we could reach solid ground, we had to alternately bail and paddle, with Larry and I leaning left as much as we could without tipping. The mishap proved strangely fortuitous, however. It forced us to find dry land, snack ravenously, and effect a makeshift repair—for I’d foolishly forgotten my boat patch kit; and Brian had to concoct a seal with glue, duct tape, and air mattress patches. Delayed by hours, we paddled late into a moonlit evening with bioluminescence in our wake, alligators slipping quietly from dusky banks as we went past, and a dark form with pectoral fin—big enough, we called out shark!—retreating from our camp-bound fleet. Strange how a mishap can lead to such wonders….

Threats and Opportunities

Shifting from the sublime to the vulgar, the greatest threats to the Everglades (colleagues with the Sierra Club and South Florida Wildlands Association told me) are from surrounding roads, often fatal to wandering animals and disruptive of natural hydrology; water diversions and pollution upstream by agribusiness (“big sugar”); exurban development, slowed but not stopped by recent economic slowdowns; and climate chaos, which could drown most of Everglades National Park by end of this century. Conversely, opportunities for rewilding the Everglades are great. To that end, conservationists are pushing to have five miles of the Tamiami Highway elevated to allow renewed water flows and wildlife movement.

I cycled the Tamiami Highway, which runs east-west across South Florida and separates Everglades National Park from Big Cypress National Preserve to its north, and found it to be scary indeed, from the perspective of wildlife or a human not encased in metal. My ride east on the road had not been too bad, as it was early morning and traffic not yet heavy. I made my first of many escorts that morning, helping a tiny turtle across the road and to the relative safety of the adjacent canal. After a hike on the Florida Trail, however (knee-deep mud south of the road; open savanna and tall cypress stands north), my return ride at dusk was terrifying. Cars and trucks were tearing past me at deadly speeds, and one car with a missing headlight rocketed toward me so fast I barely got off the road in time. I could scarcely imagine being a young panther trying to cross this highway, which has warning signs for motorists but lacks proper wildlife crossings.

Thankfully, nearby Alligator Alley (Interstate 75 across Florida) and Route 29 (north–south, west of Big Cypress) have been outfitted with wildlife crossings, and the cats and bears and other creatures are finding and using them, meaning fewer animals killed on roads. Human lives are also being saved, as fewer drivers swerve to miss animals crossing roads at night. As I cycled north along Route 29, I stopped to check several wildlife underpasses, and found them liberally decorated with quadruped tracks, hard to make out in the sandy substrate, but some of them the right size for adult panthers.

Expanding existing protected areas is another great opportunity in the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. Much of the area around the parks and wildlife refuges is degraded agricultural land, some of which could be purchased by the state or federal government for restoration, to the benefit of wildlife, outdoor recreationists, and water quality. Tourism is a mainstay of the Florida economy, and people flock there not to see ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Island Press E-ssentials Program
• Contents
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• Introduction. Why I Chose the Wildway: Background to a Long Trek
• Chapter 1. Where the Panther Still Prowls: Greater Everglades Ecosystem, Florida
• Chapter 2. No Preservation without Representation: Longleaf Pine Savanna and Southeast Coastal Plain Waterways
• Chapter 3. Red Wolf Realm: Southeast Coastal Plain and Piedmont
• Chapter 4. Our Biggest Parks Not Big Enough: Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Southern Appalachians
• About the Author
• About Wildlands Network
• About Island Press
• Island Press | Board of Directors
• Follow Island Press