22 March 2007 Lake Region Audabon Street Nature Center

This is a small nature center which seems to be run by the local neighbourhood. We drove down a narrow track, through woodland, to a small car park, surrounded by trees, which was, and remained, deserted.
It was completely devoid of traffic, or any other human, noise. It was only the presence of a dilapidated notice board that indicated we were in the right place at all. Next to this was a nesting box, with several copies of a map, well an A4 sheet with a vaguely circular thick black line with the odd description on it, such as ‘pond’, or ‘lake’. There was no sense of scale, but we appeared to be in the middle of the area labelled ‘Butterfly Garden’ although the only evidence seemed to be a single, but very beautiful, large iridescent black/blue butterfly floating around in it.
Nevertheless, there appeared to be a track disappearing into the forest. We unshipped Sally’s electric wheelchair and set off. The first thing to notice was the amount of dead stuff all around, the second thing was that the path was quite uneven, wet in places, sandy in others, with lots of roots on its surface, Sally’s chair had to work like an ATV to make progress along this pathway. When we stood in the car park is was a pleasant, warm spring afternoon. By the time we were 20 feet into the forest the atmosphere had changed, it was warmer, absolutely still, and humid, so humid that water just dripped of trees and bushes, almost as though it was raining. We were surrounded by tall pines and palms, with often dense undergrowth beneath, and American oaks (same bark, but not the pretty leaf shape of our oak trees), which had less dense undergrowth. The trees all had those swampy epiphytes (air plants) hanging from them. Lots of ferns and frondy plants. Old dead and rotting trees and leaves covered any clear areas; many of the dead trees had strange fungi on them. We could hear lots of bird noises, jays, and warblers mostly, although we did hear a woodpecker tapping away in the distance. Lots of bright butterflies flitted round the undergrowth.
As we moved along the path you could often hear scurryings of lizards scampering away through the leaves. Sally and I are not bird experts, so identifying them is not easy. We spent some time watching a small red and brown bird carrying nest making material into an old bird house. As we approached the lake (according to the map, because we couldn’t see very far) the undergrowth became more dense, we passed giant bamboo thickets 30 feet tall. It was even more humid here, everything was wet, the ground, even the path, became quite boggy.
When we reached the lake, it was a small muddy beach with rushes to either side, under a large oak tree which over hung the water. There was a small viewing hide there. Sally and I went in; there was a restricted view of the lake. I spent some time taking pictures of the edge of the lake, and then noticed a tree which had fallen into the lake, the base of the trees was about 6 feet to the right of the little hut. As I looked at it I could see an alligator sleeping on the trunk, only about 20 feet away. Our first encounter with Florida’s most dangerous creature! We carefully crept round the shoreline to get a better view of it – it didn’t move, we took pictures of it. We realised it was awake, at least its eyes were open, but the whole time we were there it just ignored us. It was quite big, about 5 feet long and it had ferocious teeth. We sat on the lakeshore (there was a bench) and had our picnic lunch. While we were there an eagley looking bird (there are loads of big predator birds and I have not sorted them out yet) flew past with a big fish in its talons, we saw a terrapin perched on a log about 10 feet away and all the time there were ducks swimming past and cranes flying past and little warblers flitting round in the oak tree above. It was a lovely little adventure in a rain forest. After our lunch we made our way back to the car park, where it was still dry and pleasant and the single butterfly still flitted round in the butterfly garden. This, we decided was our first real taste of Florida wild life. What a wonderful afternoon we had. We then re-emerged into the hustle and bustle of the American freeway and the Audubon Nature Center returned to its quiet and patient pre-occupation with growing, flowering, eating, dying, decaying and regrowing.