As a starter, we took the trolley to rediscover the lay of the land. This place, like much of America, has had the audacity to change significantly while we were away, but some things remain the same. Naples is a playground for the superrich and, hence, abounds with up-scale shopping areas; which has gown almost as fast as the mega-mansions. Most towns have one or two high end shopping areas; Naples is lousy with them. Needless to say we worshiped them from afar. The automobile de jure is the Bentley—a nice little set of wheels running in the mid to high six figure range. We did splurge by attending a film (Lincoln) at Silverspot, a movie theater that pretty well defies the name. It has a restaurant, a bar, popcorn that requires a second mortgage to acquire, and wide, leather seats reminiscent of a La-Z-Boy showroom. The price of the flick was pretty amazing, too. Fortunately, the movie was really outstanding.
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| City Dock from our luncheon restaurant |
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| Naples Pier |
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| You've been "mooned" by a conk in the Rookery Bay touch tank |
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| "Right Hand" & "Left Hand" shells |
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| They grow 'skeeters big in Florida |
Supplies ran low and we were forced to make a Costco run on
Sunday. Wow! We live in a world largely devoid of shopping
mania, so we were stunned to find the place crawling with thousands of people
(all of the shopping centers we passed on the way over there---some 15
miles—were also totally packed). There
was grid-lock in most of the aisles and the little old ladies handing out food
samples were swamped by greedy, shoving old people. The range of language made us feel like we
were trapped on the upper floors of the tower of Babel…and very little of it
was English. Since we were stocking up
for our next leg of travel that will include two months in the Keys, we stocked
up on staples and spent a fortune—we felt like we fit right into the massive
hoards.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary owned and operated by the Audubon
Society is another of those natural gems that foresight helped preserve. In the dawn of the Twentieth Century, ladies'
hats were the rage and those hats were bedecked with the plumes of wild
birds. Many of those birds made Florida
their home. Like a lot of things in this
country that will yield a profit, profiteers set about to get rich and to
decimate the bird population all in one fell swoop. Appalled by this behavior, Audubon and others
set out to right this egregious wrong.
They did it by pushing the government to pass laws forbidding the
harvesting of bird plumes and then set up wardens that supervised the nesting
grounds to keep the scofflaws at bay since the government couldn’t be bothered. Later in the 1950s loggers decided to
continue their relentless pursuit of old growth Bald Cypress trees in Southwest
Florida. Alarmed by the further
decimation of wildlife habitat and the clear-cutting of trees in this region,
the Audubon Society set about to purchase some 2,800 acres of land northeast of
Naples to keep it pristine; thus we have Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. Thinking that Christmas Day would be a good
time to have the place to ourselves, we packed a lunch and headed out for a
field trip. Two thirds of the human
population of Southwest Florida thought it was a good idea. The Sanctuary set a daily attendance record
on Christmas Day.
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| Is that a 'gator back there? |
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| Corkscrew Swamp |
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| We spotted this one on the roof of a car as we went through Macdonald's drive thru |
While it was a pleasant outing and we enjoyed our stroll
around the 2.25-mile boardwalk, there was little wildlife and lots of humankind
afoot in the refuge. We saw a few birds
(and not a single Wood Stork, who have historically made this area its primary
nesting area), but not much better than one can find in almost any area of
standing water anywhere in the state.
Apparently global warming is contributing to the movement of Wood Stork
further north into Georgia for nesting in huge numbers leaving the
historic areas bereft. There are those
who claim that this no such thing as global warming, but apparently, they
forgot to tell the birds. There are also
those who will allow that things are warming but that it is simply a matter of natural
cycles…except that natural cycles take thousands of years, not short decades, to
accomplish much. These folks don’t want
to concede that humankind’s activities have any hand in all of this fairly
rapid change because then they would have to question their economic model or
change behavior.
Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge,
Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park,
and Big Cypress National Preserve are just three set-asides along with
Everglades National Park and the aforementioned Rookery Bay RNERR that strive
to preserve the natural area that comprises all of South Florida. Immortalized as the “River of Grass,” the
Everglades region is an amazing area that historically supported a vast variety
of wildlife quite unlike any other place in the country. It has had its ups and downs over the years
and the developers, hunters, and agriculturists almost succeeded in completely
drying up the entire region and killing off the fauna that, at one time,
comprised much of the southern third of the state. Fortunately, saner folk prevailed and much of
the region is being reclaimed, although it will never be like it once was. All of the current mitigation efforts cannot
undo decades of pillage, and climate change is adding to the further degradation
of the “Glades.”
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| 10,000 Islands |
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Bald Eagle in Fakahatchee Strand
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| A few 'gators in Big Cypress Preserve |
We spent a day this week exploring pieces of each of these set-asides. A short nature trail in 10,000 Islands yielded a few shots of egrets, ibises, and wood storks. The 22-mile gravel (pot-holed) track through the Fakahatchee Strand showed us lots of swamp land and a few birds and a couple ‘gators. Big Cypress had lots of viewing areas for alligators, and the bird population (egrets, wood storks, herons, anhingas, ibises, bald eagles, ospreys, king fishers, and cormorants) was fairly abundant. Like other outings here in Naples, the places we went were very crowded with the exception of the Fakahatchee Strand fairly primitive road; otherwise it was packed. English is not the language heard most frequently on these outings. Many varieties of European tongues are present, along with mucho Español.
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| The view outside our front window in Naples |
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