South Florida habitat gone!

I just got back from a week in Southern Florida. Great fun with my wife to get out of the Colorado Snow but a bust for photographing indigos.

I have not been since 1982 and went to areas that once during the right time of year and conditions yielded 1-6 Indigos a day. Many commercial collectors did collect a lot of indigos but there were conditions at play during the 50's, 60's, early 70's that allowed the indigo to maintain higher than normal populations along manmade waterways. It is really irrelevant as to how many stayed in the wild for breeding after they were protected. The bulldozers "the killing machines of the present" wiped them out in a much more efficient method than overcollecting if it ever really did "dent" the overall populations?

Today everything east of the Everglades Park is for sale, in agriculture or being cleared in large tracts to plant exotic palms. The Palmeto,pine and saw grass are bulldozed into large piles and destroyed (they have no value commercially). It does not look like the State of Florida is doing anything to stop it nor are they relocating the Indigos from the developing properities. I find the word "developing" rather a funny word since it usually means the end of life that has been there for hundreds of years.

I stood and read a poster telling about the push south into Florida "wasteland" by the railroad just over 100 years ago. All was well in South Florida for 1000s of years and then in just 100 it is close to gone.
It really made me sad, If you drive down the highways they are a bit of a facade for what is behind just a few hundred feet into the habitat. Dirt roads head east to the ocean, dirt and gravel quarries are digging a huge amount of material and clearing the land.

I was walking down dirt roads that were almost to the very edge of the canals made wider by a steady stream of people on dirt bikes and 4 wheelers, garbage from fishermen and people shooting shotguns and leaving the plastic cases were everywhere I went. I wondered why the roads got wider and the vegetation had reduced along the sides, now I witnessed first hand how it is being done. Also I watched some 4 wheelers doing 360s in the road stirring up white chalk dust that coats all the trees as well as very large deep holes in the road where "mudding" is popular.

Anyway I had hoped after all the hoop-la about protecting the indigos and insuring their survival things would be better. They will survive in the Everglades Park, a ranger said they found a road kill last year that was a young animal. That makes me feel better but anything beyond that, the state is open to any and all who want to use it for whatever they want!

Breed as many as possible in captivity for at some point in the future I am sure the State of Florida will wake up to the fact they need a program similar to what saved the alligator. The lucky thing for the alligator and american crocs is that nobody wanted to develop swamps as much as flat dry land and the had a place to regain a foothold.

Cheers
Keep up the good work with captive breeding, even though State officials largely ignore the efforts.

wlamore

_________________
MolurusBreedingCenter
Bill Lamoreaux
Longmont, Colorado
molurusbreedingcenter@msn.com

I hear ya. I went to the U of Miami in the late 60's. It used to take just minutes out of Coral Gables to get the glades. Now from the center of town it takes about an hour.

I was at Loxahatchee one year during a drought and was speaking with the park ranger. The flood gates were wide open with water pouring out of the glades. At the same time the papers were saying conserve water, and the Everglades are in danger, etc. So I asked him why they just didn't close the dam down. It is because the Everglades are below sea level and they can't have salt water coming back in through the canals. Not to mention the "haves" in Coral Gables would scream bloody murder. They've screwed up the entire system down there.

Well, about a month ago the wife and I were walking through the Bok Sanctuary near Lake Wales, FL, and spotted a good sized female indigo prowling along the edges of one of the ponds there. I've got a video clip, but haven't had time to download it to the PC and massage it to a viewable file yet. But here's a couple of stills I took with the camcorder (not very good quality, I am afraid - the video is MUCH better than the stills this camera takes).