Big Cypress National Preserve

Swamps: Vast Wilderness Watered by Tropical Summer Rains

Big Cypress Swamp. "Big" refers not to the tree’s size but to the swamps extent of more than 2,400 square miles in subtropical Florida. "Swamp" is a misnomer, for the land consists of sandy islands of slash pine, mixed hardwood hammocks (tree islands), prairies, cypress domes and stands, marshes, and estuarine mangrove forests. Still, "swamp" somehow fits. The vast wildness of it tickles our fears of snakes, spiders, and unknown danger, yet its beauty beckons us into the knee-deep water. Air plants, both bromeliads and orchids, perch on the cypress and hammock trees like strange bird nests. An occasional Florida panther leaves impressive paw marks in wet marl. Black bears clay crayfish our from the sloughs or rip cabbage palmetto apart for its soft fruits.

Big Cypress is about one-third covered with cypress trees, mostly the dwarf pond cypress variety. Broad belts of these trees edge wet prairies; cypress strands line the sloughs where deeper water prevails; and occasional cypress domes dot the horizon like hills on a vast plain. Giant cypresses are nearly gone. They are the great bald cypresses. Today’s few remaining giants, escapees of the lumber era, embody antiquity; some are 600 to 700 years old. Their bulbous bases flare downward and outward to root systems loosely locked in rich, wet organic peat. Their girths outstretch the combined embrace of you and three long-armed friends. The big cypress trees stand safe now, here in this national preserve, from earlier fates as gutters, coffins, stadium seats, pickle barrels, and the hulls of PT boats. It’s reason enough for alligators, also protected, to grin.

A Swamp full of Cypress Trees

In our own short past here, we humans have tried almost everything with this grand swamp. The Calusa, Miccosukee, and Siminole Indians subsisted here. Escaped slaves may have sought refuge here. Later grand schemes sought to drain vast regions: meandering rivers were gutted to straight canals, and sawgrass prairies became sugar cane and citrus plantations. Loggers came. Oil rigs came. Land speculators descended. Then came roads and drainage canals that parched extensive tracts. But the main resource turned out to be water – not land, not trees, not oil, but fresh water wending slowly seaward, requiring a day to flow across a half mile of the land’s incredibly unrelieved flatness.

With completion of the Tamiami Trail in 1928, the Big Cypress became easily reached, and economic exploitation began in earnest. Lumbering boomed in the 1930s and 1940s, and small settlements at Ochopee, Monroe Station, and Pinecrest attracted plants, raising cattle, or leading tours – latter day pioneers fleeing urban restraints.

Florida’s first producing oil well was drilled in 1943 north of the present-day preserve, near Sunniland. During the 1960s drainage schemes blossomed. Thousands invested sight unseen in land that was under water much of the year. Public interest burgeoned when jetport plans were unveiled in 1968 for the swamp’s edge. The threat posed to the watershed of Everglades National Park sparked establishment of the Big Cypress National Preserve. The 1970s brought more enlightened attitudes toward watersheds and wetlands. Today Florida is much involved in environmental protection efforts. Now we are back simply to trying nature’s way while allowing for recreational enjoyment.

A reporter once overheard a south Florida native say: "If California had our water, they’d think they’d gone to heaven." Sixty inches of rain fall in an average year, beginning as clouds stacked up over the Gulf of Mexico. The rain falls every afternoon during a season of thunderstorms that usually begins each year in May.

The rains flood the cypress strands and prairies before flowing slowly to the south through Everglades National Park. It is a slow drainage upon which creatures great and small have learned to depend. Only humans were quite slow to realize our dependence. The land slopes only two inches per mile to the Gulf of Mexico, causing a delayed drainage of the wet season’s watery bounty, its lifeblood. The gradual drainage extends the wet season by two to three full months after the rains taper off in October. And it provides a steady mix of fresh water and salt water in the estuaries along the coast of Everglades National Park. This nutrient-rich mix supports marine animals such as pink shrimp, snook, and snapper, all important to Florida’s fishing industry. The swamp also provides vital water for several southwest Florida cities. During the wet season much of the landscape may flow with water belly-high to a great blue heron.

Most out-of-staters come here in the dry season, winter, to escape the rigors of snow and ice elsewhere. In the dry season water evaporates or flows into the estuaries downstream, and the swamp’s aquatic life concentrates in the remaining deeper pools and sloughs. To these come stately wading birds, the herons and egrets and the unique wood stork. With luck you may see alligators, red-cockaded woodpeckers, wild turkeys, deer, mink, or bald eagles, as though the drying up of the water reduced these creatures’ hiding places. But this is an illusion; life simply concentrates at its source – water.

Amazing things have been seen here. A gar might flash silver-gold in the amber water under a blooming bromeliad. Herons and ibises were once measured here not by count but by the number of acres their numbers covered at one sighting. They continue to survive at Big Cypress, their presence echoing through the swamp in eerie calls. For sounds try the wild and unsettling wailing of the long-legged, long-billed, limpkin. Use your other senses, too. Feel the sawgrass, and in that feeling touch one of the oldest green growing forms of this world.

Two worlds of beauty confront us here: the beauty of broad sweeps and limitless horizons; and the beauty of infinite miniature and interrelated worlds. One is the aerial view, perhaps of the swallowtail kite; the other is the view from a self-propelled canoe, or the view of a gator with only eyes and snout protruding from the water. That’s Big Cypress Swamp.