A Tour Guides View Of The Big Cypress

By: Glenn Wilsey, Sr.

The Everglades is made up of three major ecosystems. From the middle of state to the east is the river of grass. From the middle of the state to the west is our cypress forest and from the East Coast all around the South Florida peninsula to the West Coast is our mangrove forest. This month I’m going to talk about the “Big Cypress.”

In the middle 30’s, The Tamiami Trail was completed and this made for easy access to the heart of The Everglade’s cypress forest. With easy access came loggers. Cypress wood is prized for its longevity in places where there is high humidity or for use in water. Cypress is also called wood eternal because it doesn’t decay as fast as most other wood. Some of the cypress trees cut by the loggers were six or seven hundred years old.

The cypress forest is about one and one half million acres. In 1974, congress set aside about five hundred seventy thousand acres of cypress forest, calling it The Big Cypress National Preserve. So far in my stories I have mostly been telling y’all (Red neck ebonics) about the river of grass. I think the river of grass is awesome, but to me the Big Cypress is the most beautiful part of The Everglades system!

Among the locals you may hear us refer to the Big Cypress as the cypress swamp. Although we refer to vast cypress forests as swamp, they are still a part of The Everglades’ river system.

Thousands of years ago, while Florida was still under water, the reefs grew higher and faster on the eastern and western sides of the under water plateau than they did in its center. Since the waters to the west are warmer, the reefs grew faster than those on the eastern edge did. Thus, the western half of The Everglades is a little higher than the river of grass. As our oceans grew shallow and South Florida emerged from the water, the East and West Coasts were both much higher than the middle area between them. As the rains fell north of Lake Okeechobee, the water would flow inland from both the East and West Coast. Because there isn’t much of a height difference from Orlando south to the Florida bay, the water would slowly push its way through the river of grass to the Florida bay, keeping the salt water from intruding northward. The cypress forest is made up of, pine forest, hardwood hammocks, open grass prairies and cypress strands. Each of these areas is distinctly different. What causes the difference is altitude. Here in South Florida, altitude is measured in inches and in just a few feet. The pine forest is the highest point in the cypress forest.

About every four to seven years as (El-nino’ dictates) the pine forest will flood with about one to four inches of water for about one to four weeks. The pine forests will only flood when we have a tropical low system stop over South Florida and we have rains for four days or more.

The pine forests must burn to rejuvenate themselves and re-seed the forest floor. The South Florida pine (like most pines) needs fire to open pinecones and let the seeds fall out. Fire is a very natural part of all ecosystems, excluding the rain forests of the world. The process is simple: lightning sets off a fire in the forest, the fire races trough the forest burning off all of the old dying vegetation, reseeding the forest and leaving behind ashes. Ashes contain minerals that the plants and animals need to keep them healthy for the next four to seven years until the next dry season brings about more fires. It's the most wonderful thing that can happen to the forest.

The pine forest sits on high flat limestone deposits left over from the last glaciating period. As you walk trough the pine forest, you might sink an inch or two in the mud. Sometimes you might sink a foot or two in the mud. In other parts of the pine forest you will walk across large areas of flat lime stone formations. As you move through the pine forest, you’ll walk passed thick areas of palmetto patches, wax myrtle and small open grass patches. In the cypress forest there is a lot more high ground than can be found out on the river of grass. The islands are also much bigger than the islands are on the river of grass. There are two kinds of islands in the cypress forest; there are the pine forests and the hardwood hammocks.

The hardwood hammocks of the cypress forest are just a little bit different than the hardwood hammocks of the river of grass. Some of the hardwood hammocks of the cypress forest are small, only 30 to 60 yards wide and 60 to 100 yards long. Other hardwood hammocks can be 1 mile wide and 2miles long. The hardwood hammocks of the cypress forests are, for the most part, high ground. The plants are about the only difference between the cypress hardwood hammock and the river of grass hardwood hammock. The hardwood hammock of the cypress forest is mostly made of cabbage palms, palmetto palms, willow tress, hard oaks, wax myrtle and varnish leaf. The biggest trees in the hammock are the cypress, royal palm and the tropical gumbo-limbo tress. Walking trough the hammock you’ll see Spanish moss hanging from oak trees. In some parts of the hammock there are low areas that are full of water for most of the year. Water does travel trough the cypress forest, however, it travels around the hardwood hammocks. The hardwood hammocks that are within the cypress forests are so big; they have cypress swamps within them. Remember, I said that we locals refer to the Big Cypress as a cypress swamp or as a cypress forest. The cypress forest is the whole western half of The Everglades’ river system. The water flows mostly from the northeast to the southwest in long strands. In the hammocks there are cypress swamps. These are the low laying areas in the hammock. As you walk through the hammock you may pass by some of these cypress swamps. Well, you should know that when you’re traveling with me I am NOT going to have you walk all the way around the swamp, we’d go through it. I once enjoyed the company of a great guide (and one of the best friends I have ever known), Mr. Lyle Michelle, on a walk through the cypress swamp. I’ll try to describe what it is like for you. As you walk into the swamp you will find cool fresh water, anywhere from ankle deep to waist deep. In the swamp you will see wadding birds like the great blue heron, the great egret, the little blue heron, and the little green back heron, I’ve even seen the rare snowy egret. Farther into the swamp there may be red painted turtles sunning themselves on an old fallen cypress log and some very large, soft shell turtles swimming in a hollow spot between some leather ferns. Looking up in the trees you may see a nest of Red Shouldered hawks, a male and a female. As we enter an area where the sun is shining we might catch a glimpse of an alligator ducking under the water. On the other side of the sunny opening there might be a large pile of decomposing plants and grass, an alligator’s nest. On and around the nest we may see some baby alligators around two or three months old. It was their mother that was disappearing under water. I know that you have heard that mother alligators are very protective of their nests. However, like most alligators, they will leave you alone if you leave them and their nests alone. Everywhere you look in the trees, you will see spider orchids, butterfly orchids, and ghost orchids. The wild pines and the bromeliads make up most of the plants that can be seen out in the open. As we start walking out of the cypress swamp we may see a giant cypress tree with a strangler fig growing around it. The strangler fig may have almost totally engulfed the cypress tree. We would continue out of the cypress swamp and back into the hardwood hammock and then move out of the hammock. As we leave the hammock the area opens up to a large open grass prairie and into a cypress strand.

The cypress strands are a part of the flow of the water. A cypress strand is the lowest part of a cypress forest. A cypress strand is just that, a strand. They are long but not very wide. Some strands are small only about 50 to 100 yards wide and maybe a half-mile long. A large strand can be a half-mile wide and several miles long. The cypress strands are much like the cypress swamp. As you walk from the muddy and soggy grass prairie into the cypress strands, the water will get ankle deep and even waist deep. The plants and animals are basically the same, with only a few exceptions.

The water in the cypress strand is flowing just like the rest of The Everglades’ river system. The cypress strands are older than the rest of the forest and therefore, a cypress strand is just a bit different than the cypress swamp. As you walk into the cypress strand the light dims and it becomes darker, with beams of light shinning through the tall cypress trees. As you make your way through the forest you hear tiny frogs singing their high pitched songs and the bull frogs answering back with a heavy bass hoping to impress one of the female frogs. As we continue on, a Screech Owl from one of the trees in our strand calls across the prairie to another owl in another strand. They are probably wondering what we are doing walking through the waist deep water beneath their homes.

About three-quarters of the way through the strand we’d stop to rest on an old fallen cypress tree. Looking around, we are surrounded by cypress trees that are 75 to 100 feet tall. The limbs of the tress are covered with countless orchids and bromeliads.

You must remember I speak of the folklore of The Everglades. With out folklore we have to take the government’s word and sometimes they aren’t always right. We must always get as many points of view as we can before making any decisions concerning any ecosystem. If we keep going to the west or the south we will move into the mangrove forest, our salt-water estuary but that is a whole story in and of itself.

SO UNTIL NEXT TIME SEE YA LATER ALLIGATOR!

*This story or any part of it can not be used or reproduced with out written permission of the author!

Or Me At Gatorman1@aaof.us