The shimmering waters of the everglades creep silently down the tip of
Florida under warm subtropical skies. In a vast, shallow sheet this lazy
river idles through tall grasses and shadowy forests, easing over
alligator holes and under bird rookeries, finally mingling with the
salty waters of Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico in the mangrove
swamps. From source to sea, all across the shallow breadth of this
watery landscape, life abounds.
Everglades National Park is to most Americans an Eden where birds,
mammals, reptiles, and orchids find sanctuary. Sunshine sparkles on
sloughs teeming with fish, and on marshes where wildflowers bloom the
year around; it shines on tree islands where birds roost and deer bed
down. In this semitropical garden of plant-and-animal communities, every
breeze-touched glade, every cluster of trees is a separate world in
which are tucked yet smaller worlds of such complexity that even
ecologists have not learned all their intricate relationships.
This book has been written to help you see how the many pieces of this
ecological puzzle fit together to form a complex, ever-changing, closely
woven web of plants, animals, rock, soil, sun, water, and air.