Years before I found the Everglades, moose, elk, and bear and such roamed freely in my favorite places. Northern Canada is raw, rugged,and rambling; an unforgiving world where survival has it own rewards. The Glades share in this excitement, and although bordering on civilization it demands of its inhabitants a same sense of survival.
My scalp has prickled at eerie sights like the day I squinted through the viewfinder and then troubled, turned around to an alligator standing on its tail, jaws wide open, and sparkling eye staring into both of mine.
But when the Glades makes music its beauty shines. At first silence follows the shutting of my truck door and I stand and listen, strain ears into a summer hot and liquid - and hear nothing. I gather my gear and move into the swamp, am swallowed in its tangle and become part of. That's when the music begins. Songbirds dressed in red and blue and black and yellow find the chords they'd abandoned when I entered, and then they continue. Quick, they flit from branch to branch, zip up through the canopy and come sailing back down darting here and there as if to miss seeing something would end their world. A Great Blue Heron that had refused spring migration may swoop in, squawk orders, and then disappear.
Nature - Courtesy of The Creator