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Where one might have expected to see an occasional raccoon hunting crayfish or a gray squirrel moving in the high branches, there was no movement at all.
Where only short years ago there was a swamp, now dead leaves and dying reeds carpeted the forest floor between the root elbows of towering 400-year-old bald cypresses.
In places where 8- and 10-foot alligators used to lie three or more together, dreaming their reptilian dreams, with just their nostrils and slitted eyes exposed on the water’s surface, the pools have shrunk away to puddles.
On the 2.25-mile walk along the elevated boardwalk, only four baby gators, 18-inchers at most, and one adolescent 5-footer were to be seen.
Along with a green heron, four anhingas with their wings spread to dry, and the occasional white wading bird — an ibis or egret — that was the sum of the wildlife.
Stop to listen for frogs chirping or the screech of a hawk, and what you heard instead was only the voices of visitors like yourself, coming along behind you on the walkway.
I’m thinking it was sometime in the late 1980s or early ’90s when my wife, our two daughters and I first visited the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, east of Naples, one of South Florida’s jewel cities.
This nature preserve seemed then to be a magical place, absolutely teeming with life. Today, there’s still a kind of beauty about it, especially in the colorful flower stalks of the bromeliads, clinging to the trunks of trees and drawing moisture and nourishment from the air.
But it’s a pallid, almost funereal beauty. Successive years of punishing drought, more severe than any in memory, have sucked the life from what was a lush and vibrant ecosystem.
At this time last year, it was estimated that six weeks of steady rain, several inches a day, would be needed to restore water levels in the region to normal.
That relief did not come.
“If we don’t get really good rains this April and May,” the man in the sanctuary headquarters told me this past week, “we’re going to be in awful trouble.”
The sad story playing out here in the Corkscrew Swamp is a microcosm of what’s happening, on a far grander scale, to the Everglades.
Until the current distress in the U.S. economy, South Florida was booming. In many respects, it still is. Vast tracts have been cleared to make way for new commercial centers, luxury housing developments and the ever more numerous golf courses.
Increasingly, water that once drained into wetlands is diverted to satisfy these growing demands.
The credit crisis may have somewhat slowed the conversion from nature to commerce. For, driving the area’s roads, one sees great areas cleared of vegetation, with materials stacked and ready — but not a soul working.
In all probability, however, this is merely an interlude. And when good times return, the bulldozers will roll again.
So the distress for Corkscrew, as for other such areas, seems to result from a combination of unkind weather and unchecked development.
The first of those can’t be governed. The second is unlikely to be.
In which case, natural treasures like this one can be added to the list of our probable losses.
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