Two Days in the River of Grass

The 0.8-mile Anhinga Trail boardwalk at Royal Palm is the most wildlife-dense walk in any US national park — alligators, herons, egrets, anhingas drying their wings, and purple gallinules hunt and feed within feet of visitors year-round. In the dry season (November through April), the concentration of animals at the trail's central pools is extraordinary: the receding water concentrates fish, which concentrates the predators that feed on them. This is the Everglades' food chain laid bare in miniature.

A 0.4-mile loop through tropical hardwood hammock immediately adjacent to the Anhinga Trail. The gumbo limbo, strangler fig, wild coffee, and royal palms of the hammock interior support a completely different ecosystem from the open sawgrass prairie — cooler, shadier, and quieter. Air plants and wild tree orchids colonize the upper branches.

A 7-mile network of flat trails through Long Pine Key's pine rockland ecosystem — one of the most endangered habitats in the world, found today only in the Everglades and the Bahamas. The South Florida slash pine grows from exposed limestone bedrock in a savanna of tall grass and saw palmetto; the understory includes rare plants like the Everglades' only native cactus, the semaphore pricklypear, and the Florida prairie clover found nowhere else on Earth. White-tailed deer, Florida panther tracks, and eastern indigo snakes are occasionally seen on the longer loops. This is a fundamentally different Everglades from the wetland visitors typically imagine.

An elevated boardwalk platform above the vast interior sawgrass prairie — the heart of the Everglades, where the 'river of grass' is most visible. A flat, treeless sea of sawgrass reaching every horizon, broken only by distant tree islands and an immense Florida sky. In winter, hawks and owls hunt above the grass; in summer, lightning strikes continuously on the horizon as afternoon storms build over the interior.

The Buttonwood Canal connects Florida Bay to Coot Bay through a mile of buttonwood forest — paddling it at dawn, before the wind comes up and before the motorboats arrive, is the definitive Flamingo experience. The canal is flat, protected, and manageable for beginners, but the wildlife density rivals the Anhinga Trail: herons fish from the banks, cormorants dive in the narrow channel, and osprey work the canal methodically from both directions. Manatees are common in winter. Kayak rentals are available at the Flamingo Marina from 7am.

A 1-mile loop around a freshwater pond near the Flamingo campground that is one of the best birding spots in south Florida — roseate spoonbills, wood storks, tricolored herons, anhingas, and a rotating cast of warblers and shorebirds use the pond year-round. In early morning and late afternoon the spoonbill flocks can be spectacular. After the loop, the short Flamingo Hammock Trail passes through a buttonwood and black mangrove thicket to a Florida Bay overlook.

The Flamingo Marina runs 90-minute ranger-guided boat tours of Florida Bay's mangrove islands, crocodile habitat, and seagrass flats. American crocodiles — a true crocodilian, not to be confused with alligators, distinguished by their narrower snout and lighter coloring — nest on several of the bay's mangrove keys and are regularly seen on the tours. The Flamingo area is the densest population of American crocodiles in the country, sharing the same waters with American alligators in what biologists describe as unique in the world.