Our Vanishing Wilderness; 5; Will The Gator Glades Survive

The following program is from NET. This is Miami Beach, the fun and sun capital of the world. The warm, cloudless tropical winters provide the fun. But all the water comes from the heavy summer rain stored in the porous rocks of the Biscayne Aquifer. Water for South Florida, where the population has tripled in 20 years and is still growing phenomenally.

The problem is they cut canals and develop and they're going to drain that aquifer. The salt water will intrude and they'll be in trouble. They'll have to go further and further inland to get fresh water for the people. This is coming. The land is like Okeechobee. Half a century ago, its waters flooded during summer rains, all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico. This was the Everglades. Though much of it still looks wild, 49% has been converted into water conservation areas for the cities. Another 41% has been drained for the giant truck farms, the biggest in the world. The winter vegetable crops grown here return nearly $200 million a year from northern markets. It's all been made possible by a network of levees, canals and pumping stations. An incredible plumbing system that diverts most of the water away from the Everglades National Park. The Tamiami Trail, U.S. Highway 41, on the park's northern boundary, dams off and channels the flow through the locks,

operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Florida Flood Control District. I'm Ed Dayle. I'm Executive Director of Southern Florida Flood Control District. Let me clarify, first of all, they're not locks. They're simply water control structures. The design of the conservation areas is to permit that water to flow as it always did flow gradually southward into the park. Well, that's the theory, but not the way the plan works. In wet years like this one, the conservation areas flood. The engineers pumped in water from Lake Okeechobee, and in one day in March, it rained 11 inches. Deer floundered in the high water. The little fawns hopelessly. And there's towns and little fawns like it's going to die this year. You can see his legs right here how they're all infected due to the high water. Pushing them up on water on the ground there is, and we hold a flood control responsible for its damage.

The trouble is many of the islands of higher ground are disappearing with the year-round flooding. So in a heavy rain comes, there's no place for the deer to go. And that could be in the end of the deer in hundreds of square miles. This has happened since the new dams were completed along the Tamiami Trail eight years ago. As fishing game director Earl Fry explains. Prior to 1966, we had somewhere between 7,500 and 8,000 animals in the conservation areas two and three. This is now declined, now down to about four to 600. Not only have these impoundments drowned thousands of deer, but they have so far failed to supply the national park a sufficient water during the dry season when it's most needed. Without it, resident birds like the Enhinga cannot fish until the summer rains return. The water cycle affects even the bald eagle among the first birds to return from the north and start their courtships in these coastal marshes along about the middle of October.

Where the salt and fresh waters flow into each other, about 10 miles inland, the man grows appear. First his tiny bushes on stilt-like prop roots, then his tangled branching trees, strongly buttressed above the high hurricane tides. The flash of flame in the sky, the rosy at Spoon Bill is a rare visitor to these thousands upon thousands of dark green islands in a labyrinth of brackish rivers. In the rainy summer, many of the birds roost on the outer keys, and in the fall they return to the heads of the rivers to find fresher waters and prepare for the breeding season. Since the interruption of the historic flow from the north, however, the water table has dropped, and so have the numbers of waiting birds that nest in the park, from a million and a half to about 50,000 today. There is just one resident colony of Spoon Bill's in Florida Bay.

By late fall, a snowy grid has put on its courtship plumes, an elegant display. Some of the birds are too young to do anything but watch and wait for another year, when they too can be beautiful. Like a cosmetic, an emerald green ring around the eyes of the Anhinga anticipates spring. When the water is still high, alligators roll over the blades, praying on anything that moves. Horatious, true, vicious, maybe, even cannibalistic sometimes. Yet the female gator is a better mother than most reptiles. She digs a deep water hole, and that's important when other shallower ponds dry up.

She'll also stay around to look after her young until they're about three feet long. Big enough to have no fear of any creature, except men, of course. In the grasses, two stalkers are after the same frog, a young alligator and an American bitter. Most of the large, old gators are gone now, killed out for their valuable heights. And we're beginning to find out that the gator hole is a survival center in times of drought. Now the bittern turns its attention to a damsel fly. With fewer gator holes, the land changes for the American egress and other herons.

After four years of severe drought in the early 60s, it has taken four years of rain for the fishes to come back. Gambusias, sailfin mollies, and mosquito fish. In the rains of summer, these men will spread out through the jungle of roots and stems. Though plentiful, they're evasive and hard to catch until the water level drops in the winter, and they become trapped in a few of the deeper sloughs and ponds. Each one a veritable cafeteria for the birds. The Gambusia being snapped up by the little blue heron was introduced from Trinidad to help control Florida's mosquitoes. It's as well established as the native mosquito fish, which also concerns the insects larvae. Pond insects, snails, and vegetation attract the devils.

Many of them migrants, the common galanyl. The purple galanyl, with their long, thin toes that can easily walk on the weedy water and climb around on the banks. The paddle-footed coot is a stronger swimmer, often diving to pull up plants by the roots. But the herons are the most fun to watch. The smallest and probably the craftiest are the green herons. They're too short-legged to be good waiters. So they station themselves along the banks and catch the fish that are schooling among the mangrove roots. A common tactic is this stealthy approach. With neck outstretched, followed by a sudden strike, this Toledo Bill rarely misses its aim. Flocks of small egress in other larger herons congregate toward the end of the season, as many as nine different species can fish here, almost without conflict.

The taller ones in the deeper water, each with its own style of hunting. The lower the water, the easier the fishing. By January or February, a bird can grab itself enough minors in one hunting expedition to feed a whole mess full of young. All of the waiting birds raise their families at this time of year. The water level is most critical, however, for the birds that hunt entirely by feeling out their food. The spoon bill, for example, systematically puts up the bottom with its bright red toes.

Then sifts the edibles out of the muddy water with its oddly shaped and very sensitive bill. The Louisiana Heron is a stalker that grabs fish by sight. Among the birds with long, sickle-shaped bills that feed by feel is the white ibis. In this case, a juvenile-enmodeled plumage. No other bird feeds with such complete abandon as the skimmer. Hit or miss.

The lower part of the bill does the skimming, and the shorter upper part of the bill clamp shut on anything that happens to be in the way. The offspring hunts for bigger fish, including saltwater, snook, and the redfish that come in from the gulf to feed on the seasonal concentrations of minors. And the bald eagles watch. They nest close to the ospreys and keep an eye on them, but perfectly capable of catching their own, they prefer to steal their neighbor's fish. The cormorant also dives for fish, smaller ones.

Ospreys try for as big a fish as they can carry, and later tear up for eating, and sometimes they lose up. Cormorants have less choice about size, because they must swallow their fish whole. Endangered by pesticides and coastal developments elsewhere, ospreys and bald eagles do well enough in the park. But there are signs that the environment itself is in trouble. Mostly because of too much or too little water, these woodstarks have been able to nest only once in the last nine years. A colony of woodstarks consumes about two and a half million pounds of minors during the nesting season. For food to be available in such quantities requires a period of flooding and high mineral production in the summer, and a long period of drying in the winter, which concentrates the fish for them. For many years now, the wet and dry cycle, the natural rhythm of life in the park has been disrupted.

In the woodstark being more sensitive to the change, is only an indicator of the slow decline of the herons and other waiting birds. It's February now, a sunny nursery for eagret babies, where the rest of the continent is locked into freezing temperatures and snow. This is a heronry, a brushy island in the middle of a slew for eagrets, herons, and and hinders nest like apartment house dwellers, over and under and beside each other in a cacophony of noise. Their habit of living in columns made them particularly vulnerable to the poop hunting that began in the days of autumn, around 1840.

It did not end until about 1914. Feather hunters shot thousands upon thousands of herons, ibises, and spoonbills on their nests, leading the young to starve in the eggs to rot, just so that women could weather pooms on their hats. Out of this tragedy, there was a first conservation efforts by the Ottoman societies and other groups who lobbied successfully for laws against the feather traffic. They also changed public opinion in the styles, because women refused to buy any more plume hats, the heronries survived. And again, there were fights over territories and perches, a constant bickering between eagret and eagret, between eagret and and hinga, with trespasses always being chased off by the nest owners. In 1952, a newcomer to the Everglades Heronries, the Catalygret, arrived on the winds perhaps from Africa.

These natural invasions and territorial squalbles of birds could cope with, but new things were developing outside the park. Land drainage for agriculture, the growth of the cities, the discovery of oil, and demand for a new jet port. Altogether, a threat to the survival of these birds. Some of the problems had apparently been resolved for the help of the Ottoman societies. After the great drought of 1967, Congress legislated water for the Everglades, but there's not enough money to complete the necessary plumbing until 1984. Until then, the Louisiana Heron and other birds go on nesting by the grace of Congress. There is a new canal in the southeast section and an interim agreement that the gates of the northbound will be open to some extent every month of the year, as long as there's water to give.

That assures the supply of fish for the birds. The adults and young, the continuity of life from generation to generation, or does it. The young Anhengas eagerly reach into the store of fish and their parents' throats, unaware of another threat. A proposed jet port in a great cypress swamp, six miles above the park's northeast boundary. What would happen to this food supply after the whole complex expanded, with housing developments, pesticides from mosquito control and sewage, all draining down into the park? This year, the jet port will stop, at least for a while, by six national conservation organizations.

Acting together for the first time on the same issue, at the same moment, they arouse public feeling and persuaded top government officials to look for a new location. Some problems don't make headlines. Inside the park, some 74,000 acres are still privately owned. More than half in the coastal mangroves were large colonies of the white ibis nest. They range far from home to get food for their hungry young. Their black, downy babies won't be pure white like the parents until they're three years old. Because there's no money to buy the land, the rangers can't protect the flocks. And unfortunately, they're vulnerable to target practice, as well as other disturbance by people in the subdivisions in the hunting and fishing camps. You folks up north in the winter, you get these big, expensive brochures.

It says, come to Florida or buy a lot in Florida, $10 a down, and $10 a month for waterfront homes. This is true, and they're being sold in the northwest part of the park in their waterfront, water back, water underfoot. In fact, they're about waist deep in water. It's the mangrove country up there. There's no roads, nothing in the area. But Assistant Superintendent Joe Kennedy worries most about the increasing population in South Florida. In dry years, and with enough people, and by the year 2000, supposedly there'll be enough people. There won't be enough water to go around to the farmers and the cities and to the park. The Everglades need not just water, but water in seasonable amounts. Instead, disastrous floods have killed deer by the thousands in the conservation districts. And disastrous droughts have caused a decline of much of the wildlife in the national park.

You can kill a park by killing an animal too. The alligator may eat fish, birds, even smaller alligators. But he is also important to the survival of nearly all these creatures. Very frequently during the normally dry spring, the only water in much of the glades outside of the canal is in gatorholes. These holes serve as sort of reservoirs for the whole aquatic life of the glades. When the geaters are killed in numbers, as they have been in recent years, their holes vanish too. Filled up with silt and brush. Since 1961, it's supposed to be illegal to hunt alligators. But with the price of hides as high as it is, $6 a foot and up. There's no safety for the big reptiles, even on federal land.

National park rangers estimate the population today is only a tenth of what it was ten years ago. And they blame poachers for most of this decline. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed.

This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed.

This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. There are laws now against selling alligator products in Florida, New York State, and New York City.

But they're difficult to enforce. Some 60 years ago, the slaughter of egress and herons was stopped by a consumer boycott of feathered fashions. That could be a solution here. It's up to you, the buyer.

It's your choice. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed.

This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed.

This is the way an alligator is killed. This is the way an alligator is killed.