Thank you, Clyde Stephens, for planning our trip this year to the Seminole Reservation at Big Cypress. What an incredible job you did with site seeing, birdwatching and education!!
Below are some images, that really don’t give the trip justice! Thanks again for your hard work Clyde, thank you Peg and Bob for keeping track of all of the species we witnessed, and thank you, Susan, for the incredible write up below about the trip.
Great weather, an engaging itinerary, and a total of 76 bird species identified, including the Snail Kite, the Swallow-tailed Kite and the American Bittern made this year’s overnight trip to the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation a delight. Our group of eighteen wended its way south with the first stop at Fisheating Creek Outpost, a wildlife and environmental area in Glade and Highlands Counties for a picnic lunch and a walk around this historic area. After lunch we crossed the bridge to the Fisheating Creek Wildlife Management Area to view the site of the former home and museum of Tom Gaskins, a “home-grown” naturalist and conservationist.
From there we went to Moore Haven to the Caloosahatchee Canal, once a major river, for an overlook, and then on to the locks at Okeechobee marsh. This was an interesting spot where we saw a couple of boats passing through and two Loggerhead Shrikes sunning themselves on the locks’ fence.
At the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation we enjoyed the AH-TAH -THI-KI Museum’s excellent film on the history of the Seminole tribe, after which we walked the mile-long boardwalk behind the museum, where the birding was quite good. At the end of the walk Seminole women were making and selling handicrafts. That afternoon we enjoyed a swamp buggy tour on the reservation where we saw Asian water buffalo, bison, zebras and antelopes, along with Osceola turkeys.
Highlights of the third day included a brief stop at the Brighton Seminole Reservation, where some of us viewed an exhibition of local handicrafts, and later a superb presentation on the Kissimmee River Restoration Project Phase 1 at the Riverside Field Lab in Lorinda by members of FAU’s Center for Environmental Studies. The presentation was followed by a boat tour of the river to view some of the restoration work and do some birding along the way.
Many thanks to Clyde Stephens for a wonderful learning experience and to Peg Lindsay and Bob Putnam for recording our bird sightings.
