Everglades National Park: A river of grass

It's easy to disregard the Everglades. If you drive quickly through this marshy swath of land that stretches across Florida's most southern tip, you'll only see expansive fields of long, wispy grass. After awhile, your children are likely to tell you the scenery outside is boring.

But if you take your time to stop along your drive, walk the boardwalks and bike the trails, you'll find that this massive watershed is crawling with all sorts of critters, big and small.

We drove into the park from Miami along Highway 41, the main road that cuts directly through the park, slicing it in half. For the first several miles, you pass touristy spots advertising air boat rides and the opportunity to see alligators. We drove by those and headed for Everglades National Park and pulled off the road at Shark Valley Visitor Center.

As soon as we drove into the parking lot, we noticed a group of people gathered under a tree, their cameras pointed upward. In a huge nest, a mother owl stood guard over a white fluffy baby that looked like a stuffed animal. "Oh! It's so cute! I want to hug it" my daughter squealed. And that's basically how our day at Shark Valley went. Everywhere we turned we saw wildlife.

Right next to the visitor center, the swampy slough teemed with dopey-looking gar fish floating near the top of the water. An anhinga, a tall wiry black bird, dove into the water and caught one of the fish. After she devoured her meal, she let out a loud shriek. A massive alligator lounging in the water was completely. Oh! And there was another one, and another, and another. When my daughter counted five, she started crawling up me as if I were a tree. "Mommy, I want to go back to the car!"

And then there were the butterflies. The air was thick with them. They fluttered through the air before landing on hot pink thistles that bloomed everywhere, spewing white cotton fluff, spreading their seed. One monarch nearly landed on my daughter's wrist. "Oh Mommy! It's so pretty."

The Everglades stretch 100 miles across southern Florida—a mosaic of saw-grass prairie, cypress swamps, mangrove jungles, tropical hardwood hammock forests, and thousands of tiny islands. Some 700 plant and 300 bird species and the endangered manatee, crocodile, and Florida panther all call this swampy place home. The delicate ecosystem is shrinking and originally ran all the way to Orlando. It's a water-dependent environment and southern Florida is diverting more and more water to land development and farms.

In the visitor center, park ranger Eric Riordan talked about the disappearing habitat and how it's affecting the wildlife. I asked if there were areas where we could see flamingos. As a child, I remember seeing photographs in books of the pink feathered flocks blanketing southern Florida beaches, and I hoped to see something similar. "The Flamingo habitat is gone," Riordan said. "You very rarely see the birds. The Everglades are disappearing. The water is disappearing. That's why we need to fight hard to save this place."

We decided to explore the Everglades on bikes. At Shark Valley, a 15-mile loop trail takes you into the heart of the park, and you can rent bikes and helmets for $7.50 an hour. A tram ride also takes you along the same path.

The path is flat--yet our kids tired out after six miles. It cuts through a slough filled with lily pads the size of frying pans, fuzzy cat tails, red-bellied turtles, and alligators, lots and lots of alligators.

Along the way we passed by at least two dozen. Most sat lifeless in the water yet a few were swimming around--and one jumped right when my daughter was off her bike adjusting her helmet. We asked a ranger if the alligators ever bothered visitors. He said the park had only one incidence when a young boy was riding his bike and fell into the slough directly onto the alligator. The gator clamped down on the boy with his jaws, the mom jumped in the water and scared the animal off. A helicopter swooped in and took the boy to the hospital and he walked away. In other words, you only need to worry if you actually jump on top of an alligator.

At the end of our ride, we passed a mother gator and her 20 little babies. Most gators give birth to 20 to 50 babies yet on average two survive. Most are devoured by the father and older siblings. My son wanted to take one of the babies home, but I made sure that didn't happen. The only thing we took home with us were lots of photographs and you can see those in the slideshow below.