Some photos of birds and alligators.

This past weekend, a friend and I put our bikes on a rack and drove to the Everglades, planning to cycle round a particular path. When we got there, it was absurdly busy, possibly because this was the first genuinely nice weekend day for a while here. We decided we didn't fancy riding as part of a peloton, especially since most of the wildlife would already be scared away, so we drove further West and then took the rough loop road through Big Cypress Preserve.

Big Cypress is an area contiguous with the Everglades, and in many ways continuous, but it's a quite different ecosystem. The Everglades, for much of their expanse, are a 'river of grass' -- a body of shallow-ish water moving incredibly slowly South through a dense mass of sawgrass, with the occasional tree. Things get more swampy nearer the coast, as the salt water mixes with the fresh and mangroves replace grass. Big Cypress is all swamp, freshwater swamp populated primarily by cypresses. It breeds insects and minnows, and things that feed on them, in droves. So you get lots of wading birds, lots of small fly-catching birds, and things that feed on them; alligators, hawks, vultures.

We saw so many lovely, amazing things on the trip. I took lots of photos, and you can see them here. There's a preview below. Mostly, the photos are of big birds, which tend to stand still for longer. We also saw plenty small birds that we had no hope of identifying, and innumerable dragonflies.

It's funny how some things quickly become quotidian. There are so many ibis on the University campus, for example, that I barely glance at them, and by the end of this trip, we had stopped being impressed by anhingas. But I don't think I'll ever stop being excited by hawks, or by alligators. And last night, I saw a raccoon in my back garden. They might be pests, but even pests are exciting when they're novel.