Play golf on the beautiful...
by mcharlton
Play golf on the beautiful Colony West Golf Course
on Pine Island Road. Picking oranges, grapefruit, lemons and limes off my fruit trees. They do not exist anymore since the citrus canker came through our neighborhood. I now enjoy my bananas, pineapples and pappayas.
Every year after the hurricane season a flock of Ibis come through my neighborhood every day pecking through the lawns for worms and bugs. Five years ago I noticed one Ibis hopping on one leg lagging way behind the flock. Well, wouldn't you know, that same Ibis is still with the flock and was back again this year still lagging behind the flock but still around.
The Birds in the Everglades...
by mcharlton
The Birds in the Everglades are worth the drive.
There are over 250 different varieties of birds that come to Eco Pond in the Everglades National Park.
The picture shown is an Anhinga.
The anhinga is sometimes called the snakebird because it swims through the water with only its thin neck showing. The anhinga never seems to miss when it dives beneath the water's surface for fish. Skewering one on its pointed beak, it then flips the fish up in the air, catches it with an open mouth, and swallows it.
mcharlton's new Tamarac Page
by mcharlton
Tamarac is just outside of Ft. Lauderdale and is a relief from the busy city where I work. My home is surrounded by a golf course which creates a perfect buffer from the traffic. My swim club, The Coral Springs Aqutic Club, is only 10 min. away and is very convenient to swim laps for several hours before I go to work. Master swimmers from all over the world have stayed in my guest quarters and used the facilities at the Coral Springs Swim Club.
The Everglades is almost right in my back yard.
Here's my Cuban Frog that hangs out in my Atrium.
Everglades National Park
by mcharlton
"Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Visionary of the Evergla"
"There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmoney of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass."
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas
The Everglades: River of Grass
"Welcome to the Everglades"
Less than an hour's drive from Miami, Everglades is the largest remaining subtropical wilderness in the continental United States. Biscayne National Park, off the eastern coast of Florida, is one of several aquatic national parks. Both are unparalleled of mammals, birds, and fish.
The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for the management and protection of these extraordinary resources and for the well-being of park visitors. It is also responsible for overseeing all aspects of concession operations within the parks. TW recreational services, Inc. operates in the Everglades under a contract with the NPS to provide a variety of visitor services.
More than 1.6 million people visit Everglades and Biscayne National Parks each year. With your interest and assistance, their magnificent resources will continue to be protected and preserved for future generations.
Everglades National Park
Years ago, an unknown poet looked at the flat prairies and the seemingly endless acres of sedge that lay dense and hardy under the Florida sun, and probably thought about vast green glades, hence the name "Everglades." We don't know who gave the area its name, but it was well chosen, as was the order, Native American name for this area: Pahayokee, or "grassy waters."
If the grasses could speak, they would tell us about an area unique in all the world, where a rare cmmmunity of plants and animals exists, where the rain-soaked summer grasses teem with life, much of which is sacrificed in the winter dryness that inevitably follows.
Struggle is woven into the very fabric of the Everglades. Within the animal world there is the ceaseless competition for available water and food. Native peoples struggled here for centuries to survive, and then later to keep what had been theirs for so long. Today, the struggle is of another sort; it is the fight to preserve a unique and hauntingly beautiful environment. Many committed groups and indivduals are working to support legislation tht will provide further protectiion for the Everglades.
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