New beginnings

I feel like spring has crept up on me. I wasn’t ready. I’ve been inside for weeks, preoccupied for good reason with my new girl Madeleine, born in early March. Now that the weather has warmed a little and I’m starting to feel a like a human being again, we’ve been playing outside in the yard. And I’m noticing all those signs of spring that I wasn’t available to see until I got the whole new-baby-in-the-house-thing under some shred of control.

All the trees, even the crepe myrtles, have leafed out. The pine siskins have moved on and the chickadees have a nest in the front yard birdhouse. So far my trumpet vine is off to a roaring start and most of my perennials (and some annuals, thanks to the mild southern winters!) are starting to sprout tender green leaves. The astilbe, coral bells, and hostas out back are sprouting and ready for the growing season. And the lilies and lantana in the front are coming up too. I have a whole list of things I want to do out there. I love spring! I love the start of the growing season–it’s so full of possibilities. Every spring is a new beginning! But I’ve only had the mental capacity to think about planting anything for the past few days. Like I said, I’ve been busy with another new beginning.

Having a new baby in the house is the most intense thing I’ve ever experienced. Now that I’ve had three, I can say it never gets any easier. Each time is different, and you’re more experienced, but it’s always a challenge. It’s also always such a joyful time. I am so grateful to have accompanied each of my three little ones in their early days. And it goes by so fast! Every parent tells you that for a reason: it’s absolutely true! The seasons progress whether we’re ready for them to or not.

12-foot alligator on the porch? Shut the front door!

Motivatedphotos.com

It may sound unbelievable, but some folks on Hilton Head woke up Saturday morning before the sun to find a large male alligator on their front porch. I know it was early because the baby and I were the only ones up when Matt’s on-call phone started ringing. When someone calls Critter Management at five on a Saturday morning, it’s usually interesting. In this case, the people had a big alligator waiting for them outside.

Well, the alligator actually wasn’t waiting for them. He was probably looking for a mate. It’s that time of year. When the weather warms up, the male alligators get restless and find themselves in predicaments nearer to people than they usually prefer. (They actually end up on front porches from time to time–the alligator pictured above was taken a few years ago not far from Hilton Head Island.)

Here’s the news story and photos of the harrowing capture: 12-alligator on porch. Matt wasn’t there. He went back to bed after fielding the call to Joe.

How to Get Killed in the Everglades

We’ve heard about the dangerous creatures lurking in the swamp. Alligators, snakes, panthers, insects, even Swamp Thing and other demons are the only types of creatures that could thrive in a place as spooky as a wetland.

Now, I may be a fool, but I’m not afraid of any of these things. Well, I am very afraid, actually, but none of them would prevent me from spending the night in a swamp. I’ve been on a few nighttime swamping trips and I’ve learned how to avoid falling in the water. (And being shrouded by darkness and surrounded by water is really exciting! When I don’t have so many small people to take care of, I’m going to go on an overnight trip in the Okefenokee Swamp.) My fearlessness in the face of a night in the swamp was why, when Matt and I saw CNNHN when that family got stuck in the Everglades and weren’t rescued until the next morning, I, trying to be cool, said, “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Are you serious?” Matt said. “There’s all kinds of things that could get you in there. There’s panthers in there.”

“Yeah, but they’re rare. You just stay in the boat.”

“I would still be scared.” This from a man who captures wild animals for a living!

So what exactly could get you in the Everglades? What did the family have to be afraid of, really?

Well, there are all those snakes–both constrictors and vipers. The Burmese python, which can grow to be eighteen feet long or longer, feeds by wrapping its heavy body around prey and squeezing tighter and tighter until all the air is forced out of the lungs and its captive suffocates. Then, with much maneuvering and effort, swallows the body whole and goes about its business with a lump digesting in its middle. These snakes can grow large enough to eat a deer. Big ones could certainly kill a person, but Burmese pythons are elusive and not typically considered a threat to humans.

The venomous snakes that live in the Everglades–the coral snakes, cottonmouths, rattlesnakes–are certainly concerning. Bites from any of these will do serious tissue damage and could be life-threatening, but anti-venoms are readily available. But these snakes aren’t usually encountered when you’re in a boat, you’re more likely to come across a venomous snake while hiking in densely vegetated areas. So, although their presence could creep you out, death by snake in the Everglades is not likely.

Next, the panther. This is essentially the same cat that grabs mountain bikers in California, stalking them, pouncing like a house cat on a mouse, and killing them with those terrible teeth and claws. In Florida, however, their reputation is not so formidable. Panthers are extinct through much of their southeastern range, and although there’s a holdout population lurking around in the south Florida, there’s only a few. I’d say if you so much as glimpse, much less get picked off by, a panther in the Everglades, it’s some kind of cosmic sign and you should buy a lottery ticket.

And finally, the alligators. Alligators ambush prey, grab whatever hapless animal they target with their bone-crushing bite, drown it, and then throw their long muscular bodies into a death roll that rips the dead prey into bite-sized chunks. Not a pretty way to go. Alligators are definitely deadly, but only in certain circumstances. If you fell in the water or went for a swim, probably an alligator will come after you or at least check you out. But sitting on a boat, they may not even notice you. As a kayak guide once told me: the alligator doesn’t see a person sitting in a kayak; the alligator sees something the size of a kayak that’s much too big to eat. And, of course, they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.

And, in the Everglades, the insects are potentially life-threatening. Mosquitoes might seem like a mere pesky nuisance, but their disease carrying potential makes them risky. You could catch encephalitis or West Nile virus and find yourself in a miserable predicament.

It doesn’t sound like the family that got their boat stuck in the Everglades encountered any scary wild animals at all. However, it did rain. Without appropriate camping gear, sleeping outside in the rain can be pretty miserable. In fact, the weather, and exposure to it, is probably the most concerning part of getting stuck unexpectedly in the wilderness.

If the mosquitoes don’t get you, I suppose the rain will. If you’re going to die in the Everglades, it will most likely be at the hands of Mother Nature herself. Exposure to the elements, dehydration, hypothermia. With the family exposed on the boat in March, when nighttime temperatures can still drop into the thirties, rain could chill them faster than a python could gulp them down. It might take longer than one night to go out this way, but the weather is by far the most dangerous thing lurking in the Everglades, which, with all those wild animals, seems odd. Mother Nature’s shifting atmospheric conditions, the one aspect of wilderness we cannot kill or otherwise influence in our favor, is fiercer than her beasts.

They killed sixty-five giant snakes

This photo was used under Creative Commons from the USFWS/Southeast.

I don’t like the idea of killing things–anything–and especially not snakes. But in the case of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, you’ll never convince me that sixty-five dead snakes is enough. We should be trying to eradicate them, for goodness sake, as destructive as they’ve been to the Everglades ecosystem.

The Burmese python population in southern Florida was likely established when a breeding facility was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew, but many snakes (which are popular pets) are probably released pets. The pythons have been living there since the 1980s and quickly become top predator as they grow. Because they get to be over twenty feet long, Burmese pythons easily establish themselves as top predator.

So why can humans make such a dramatic impact on some species and be almost helpless in the face of others? The problem seems simple. If Burmese pythons are taking over the Everglades, why can’t we just send a bunch of people into the swamp to get them all out? We have eradicated so many creatures, caused so many extinctions (passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, tasmanian tigers) and would like to do it to so many others (rats, cockroaches), but some continue to evade us and pester us, particularly the invasive ones.

Being part of the human species sometimes feels like being a marauding brute that does whatever it wants–polluting, developing, over-harvesting, over-populating. Manipulating the numbers of this, the environments of that, and doing everything we can to keep everything in check. But we are not always successful and our activities sometimes inadvertently causes economic and ecological crises, such as the zebra mussels and Asian carp in the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, the Burmese python in the Everglades seems to be the next most unfortunate example of animals getting the better of us.

It turns out the Burmese python, despite being a snake that grows to be over twenty feet long and despite the fact that anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 are loose in the Everglades, is not so easy to find, even when we send a bunch of people in to kill them. Florida’s first Python Challenge, which wrapped up a few weeks ago, attracted over 1,500 hunters who had captured a total of sixty-eight snakes during the month-long competition. That doesn’t sound like very many snakes, considering how many are suspected of being in the swamp. But they had a significant home turf advantage over the hunters–even though it’s a home turf they’ve invaded and established in only the last twenty years or so.

For the snakes, though native to India, the Everglades is an ideal environment. Shallow water and thick vegetation to hide in, plenty of small mammals and bird eggs to eat. Plenty of places for a snake to hide. Like the Norway rat in New York City, the animal, though displaced from its natural habitat, is well-suited and adapts quickly to the new digs. Establishing itself quickly and in a way that makes it impossible to remove, even when hundreds of hunters sign up to help.

Perhaps, though, with a little more information, we’ll be able to do more in the future. Scientists implanted three pythons, whose lives were spared, with tracking devices–two devices for each snake, in case one fails, which means the scientists are really invested in getting this data–and then released the snakes back into the Everglades. Those snakes will be followed until breeding season. It’s hard to say for sure, but wonderful to imagine, where in the swamp those snakes could lead us.

Early spring

Do you see that? Those are leaves–not just buds, but fully leafed-out leaves–on the live oak in my front yard . . . on February 4.  That’s early, even for coastal South Carolina.

I noticed the buds about a week ago, and then I noticed that one of my scrawny little azalea had a red bud about to bloom. Azaleas don’t usually bloom until March. But we’ve had warmer-than-usual weather, so spring is coming earlier.

Early leaves are more than early leaves, of course. I read a study that made many predictions about what warmer weather and early leaves means for everything around those leaves.

First, using a model they created to determine how fewer cold days affected the timing of buds appearing on trees and comparing that model to observations collected about trees across North America by the USA National Phenology Network, the scientists determined that by the close of the century we’ll see spring leaves eight to forty days earlier than what we saw last century.

Because trees exist to exchange energy, water, and pollution between earth and the atmosphere, having leaves come out earlier and stay around for longer during the year means the way the world’s ecosystems work will change as well. Once the leaves come out, more energy from the sun is used to evap­o­rate water from the leaves rather than heat up the earth’s surface, which means changes in daily tem­per­a­ture ranges, sur­face humid­ity, stream­ flow, and nutri­ent loss from ecosys­tems, accord­ing to the scientists.

The study also suggests that warmer weather and earlier spring budding could change the forests themselves. Deciduous trees may be given the competitive advantage over evergreens, for example, which will in turn change the foods available to wildlife in the forests and the presence of certain animal species altogether.

What’s most fascinating about this is that, little by little, a warmer planet becomes an entirely different planet, from the temperature of the air to the trees in the forests to the birds and beetles and other animals that live in them. The small changes are happening right in front of us, and all we have to do is look.

Winter views of the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge

Every winter, the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge becomes like a wildlife vacation destination, drawing migrating birds from states up north. And on a sunny–and unseasonably warm even for the Lowcountry–Sunday afternoon it also drew us.

My pregnant-lady sciatica makes birding and wildlife watching difficult because I can barely walk. I haven’t been hiking since August. But the SNWR has a road you can drive through, making it the perfect place to go see some birds whether you can hike or not.

The refuge is a wide expanse of swamp between Hardeeville, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. A century ago, the refuge was a working rice field. Now that the farmers have gone, the remnants of their trenches and the grassy lowlands blur the edges of the Savannah River. Riding through there is not only a wildlife tour, but an archeological one as well; remnant of rice trunks and irrigation structures from this land’s past life still exist.

We entered the refuge at the Laurel Hill Wildlife Drive, which was busy with other cars, considering it’s a wildlife refuge. We were one of a string of cars, each separated by two or three hundred yards. People were carrying long sets of binoculars (which we forgot to grab, by the way) and stopping to get out of their cars. I didn’t, however, forget my camera.

First, we saw American coots paddling around, diving and splashing to pull food from under the tannin water.

Although I couldn’t get a picture, the red-winged blackbirds were busy in the bushes, calling and trying to keep hidden from my sight. These are one of my favorite birds to see because they remind me of my grandmother’s yard. Red-winged blackbirds used to cling to the cattails that lined a creek down the hill at the edge of her large property. Her house was surrounded by over a hundred acres of pond, forest, creeks and grassy hills, and my house could be seen from her front door. I grew up swimming and paddling a canoe on my grandparent’s pond with the sound of red-winged blackbirds calling from somewhere nearby. Seeing one of these little fellows all the way down here in South Carolina, where they are fairly common in the swamps, always makes my heart flutter.

It had been warm for January for about a week–mid to upper seventies and even the low eighties in the afternoons. I spotted, and subsequently scared away, this pair of blue-winged teals.

And even the alligators, I was delighted to find, were out for the nice weather. This guy, shown flopped on the hammock in the center of the picture below, had to be at lease ten feet long.

Here’s a view of the ports, way across the swamp, along the Savannah River, where more ports will one day be. The sight of global commerce doesn’t seem to be bothering the little coot in the foreground, though.

I love that turtles tend to line up together on logs. It’s like of all the logs in the pond, only a certain one will do, and so they all crowd together for some sunshine.

These turtles I saw, pictured below, might be lunch if this little alligator had been in an eating mood. It probably wasn’t good and warmed up enough for a meal, though.

And finally, a congregation of fishermen–cormorants and egrets on a log.

All in all, it was a lovely afternoon on the swamp for everyone. If you go to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, don’t forget your binoculars. We would have seen a lot more birds had we remembered ours. And bug spray. The mosquitoes were out in the sunshine too.

Sunshine and bird feeders

The birds haven’t had much to pick on around my house this winter. The deer kept beating them to the bird feeder and so I stopped putting so much out. But the deer don’t usually venture out front and with so many winter birds around, so the boys and I picked up a new feeder and a fresh bag of bird seed.

We also spent a sunny morning making bird feeders with toilet paper tubes. We usually use pine cones because we have so many pine trees, but this year the trees didn’t produce many cones at all (we didn’t even have enough for a holiday pine cone craft). I found the paper roll rendition on Pinterest.

Here’s what we did. First, we gathered our supplies. Paper rolls, yarn to tie them up, bird seed; a 1:1:1 mixture of Crisco, peanut butter, and oatmeal; a butter knife to spread it; and a pair of small hands.

I punched holes in paper rolls and looped the yarn through. Then I spread the peanut butter mixture over the paper and rolled it in the bowl of bird seed.

Easy peasy, and they’re ready to hang. The boys loved it.

And so are the Carolina chickadees. They nest every year in the only bird house we have out front; this year their house is surrounded by paper roll bird feeders.

Welcome home, chickadees!