In April my mom and I made the drive down to Florida to visit my brother and his family. The trip had a few different threads running through it. Wetlands and wildlife, history, space, and time with people who matter. This post covers the first two.
Florida has a way of reminding you that humans are the newcomers here.
One morning we headed out for an airboat ride, my first time on one. If you have never been on an airboat, the experience is exactly as loud and fast as you are imagining and somehow still better than that. Our captain was a natural guide, weaving in the local flora and fauna alongside stories from his years working the water in the area. The kind of knowledge that only comes from actually living it.
We saw alligators doing what alligators do, completely unbothered by the boat or by us or by anything else. Birds of all kinds went about their business along the banks. And sharing the landscape with all of it were the Cracker Swamp Cows, which I had never heard of before and immediately needed to know more about.
Florida Cracker cattle are one of the oldest breeds in the United States, tracing their roots back to 1521 when Juan Ponce de Leon brought a small herd of Andalusian cattle from Spain on his second voyage to the New World. When the Spanish eventually abandoned their attempts to colonize the Florida interior in the early 1700s, they left the herds behind. Those cattle spent the next few centuries adapting to the heat, humidity, scrubland and swamp of Florida and becoming something entirely their own. Small, lean and remarkably resilient, they graze on wiregrass and palmetto and swamp vegetation with almost no human intervention.
The name comes from the cowboys who worked them. Ranchers used long whips to flush the cattle out of dense brush and drive them to market, and the crack of those whips across open terrain became their calling card. By the mid-20th century the breed had nearly disappeared through crossbreeding. Conservation efforts by the state and the Florida Cracker Cattle Breeders Association, formed in 1989, pulled them back. Today the state recognizes them as a heritage breed and a living piece of Florida history. Seeing them standing knee-deep in swamp water, completely at home, it is easy to understand why people worked so hard to keep them around.
What struck me most was something the captain mentioned about the water levels. Hurricanes roll through, the levels rise and fall dramatically, and then everything just resets. The ecosystem absorbs it and returns to normal. There is something genuinely humbling about watching a landscape that has been doing exactly that for thousands of years and will keep doing it long after any of us are gone.
We also spent a morning at the Orlando Wetlands Park, located in Christmas, Florida just east of the city. The backstory behind it is one of those only-in-Florida turns of events.
Settlers first arrived in the 1830s. The Army built Fort Christmas there in 1837. After the Civil War, farmers drained the land for agriculture, and by the 1940s a dairy farm was operating on the property. By the 1980s Orlando’s population had grown to the point where its water reclamation facility was discharging nitrogen-rich water into the Little Econlockhatchee River at levels that exceeded EPA limits. The city’s solution was to purchase over 1,600 acres near Christmas and convert it back into wetlands. By 1987, workers had excavated more than 1,200 acres of former pasture and planted 2.3 million wetland plants including 200,000 trees.
Every day, millions of gallons of reclaimed water travel from Orlando’s Iron Bridge facility into the park, spend 30 to 40 days moving through a series of wetland cells, and eventually flow out into the St. Johns River cleaner than they arrived. The plants do the work. That engineering solution to a pollution problem now supports over 200 species of birds, roughly 1,700 alligators, and more than 30 species on Florida’s threatened and endangered wildlife list.
A boardwalk winds through the area and lets you move through it without disturbing it. Walking it felt like getting a look at what Florida was before the highways and theme parks arrived. Herons, ibis, turtles and all manner of wildlife going about their day as if you were not there at all. Which, in the way that matters most, you were not.
I will be putting together a dedicated page for Orlando Wetlands in the Roadside Attractions section of the site with more details for anyone planning a visit.
Space and family are coming in the next post. Florida delivered on both.
