If the Devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it."---James Carlos Blake
Hide The Chihuahuas. The Dinosaur Lizards Are Coming!
Down in the Everglades where the Burmese Python wades, there’s a new antisheriff in town. The Argentine Black-and-White Tegu, a gnarly lizard which can grow to four feet in length is shooting up saloons and rustling cattle and nobody knows what to do about it. Even worse, the Tegu Gang has proliferated widely throughout South Florida, breaking into Ropa Vieja kiosks, tamale kitchens and Cuban cigar factories. There have also been scattered tegu sightings all across the southeastern United States, posing grave threats to native species and farmers. “Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”
The species is native to South America and the critters are omnivores, which means they’ll eat anything with nutritional value they can put in their mouths---everything from the eggs of ground-nesting animals to sea turtles to your grandmother if she’s small and slow. They snack on doves and other small animals, any fruits which grow low to the ground and children in tents at outdoor sleepovers. And they’re extremely hardy, so don’t think you’ll scare them away with a broom and few cuss words. Think triple-sized raccoons with a bad attitude.
The reptiles have now been reported in four counties in South Carolina, which has instituted a ban against pet-ownership of the animals. Georgia has also passed similar precepts. There have been isolated reports of tegu presence in Alabama, Louisiana and Texas, although, to their credit, they have thus far spurned Mississippi. Amy Yackel Adams, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, says the problem is worsening and “there is the potential for a very large population in the wild. The entire population of the Southeastern United States is at risk.” (Cue the theme from Jaws.)
And we’re not getting rid of them easy. Tegus are tough, able to withstand colder temperatures than most reptiles because of an ability to elevate their body temp as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit above the ambient temperature. If it gets too cold in winter, they can brumate (the reptile version of hibernation), becoming sluggish and hiding out in stolen gopher tortoise burrows. They can also recover quickly from threats such as hunting. “In the 1980s, the tegu was the most exploited reptile in the world,” says Lee Fitzgerald, professor of zoology at Texas A&M. During that time, some two million tegu skins were exported from Argentina each year for the leather trade. Yet nowhere were they hunted into local extinction.
A final warning: when you head into the swamps for business or pleasure, exercise caution. Tether your pets, arm small children with high-pressure water pistols, do not approach the wildlife and keep Will Thacker on speed dial. Somewhere in the depths of the mire, there is a tegu dessert menu with your name on it. “Ooh, Jorge, these are delightful!”
Snakes On A Plain
While driving through the swamplands some 40 miles from Miami, Mean Mike Kirkland noticed a log in the road ahead. He and a pal stopped and stepped out of his white GMC work truck to move the encumbrance. “Funny thing happened on the way to the log,” Mike said. “She saw me, picked up her head and looked me right in the eye. I’m 5-11, by the way.” The Burmese Python’s sheer size gave Kirkland pause, but he didn’t have much time for contemplation. She stretched open her mouth, revealing dozens of curved teeth as sharp as daggers, then launched her head directly at Mike. He dodged a couple of strikes before spotting an opening and grabbing the snake’s head. The nonvenomous 17-foot constrictor then tried to wrap herself around the sweating Kirkland, who slipped through coil after coil. The battle went on for twenty minutes before the exhausted animal gave up.
It’s all in a day’s work for Kirkland, an invasive-animal biologist who manages the South Florida Water Management district’s Python Elimination Program. His team patrols roads like this one beside Big Cypress National Preserve looking for Burmese Pythons, one of the world’s most unyielding invasive species. The team recently removed their 8000th serpent, which seems like a lot until you realize that Americans imported nearly 100,000 of them from Southeast Asia between 1996 and 2006. The U.S. banned their import in 2012. By then, many snake owners finally realized their pets grow to 12 feet on average and abandoned them, many to the Everglades, warm wetlands which offer the perfect adoptive habitat. Their inconspicuous patterning conceals them in the already remote swamp, which makes them difficult to track. Ecologists peg their detectability at less than one percent, which means if there are 100 snakes in your survey area, you’d be lucky to spot even one.
The pythons have officially established a self-sustaining population in the ecosystem totaling tens of thousands in South Florida alone, and the numbers are expected to increase. According to the USGS, eradication is likely impossible, and according to Kirkland “they are eating all of our native wildlife.” Though the Everglades population will only increase, the pythons are not likely to spread to similar wetlands in Alabama and Louisiana since they can’t survive the colder temperatures of northern Florida they’d have to migrate through to get there. They’re looking forward to global warming, though.
Arrgghhh!
If lizards and snakes don’t put you off, how about the Ghost Ship of the Florida Everglades, which has been sailing the murky channels since the late 1800s? Pirates like Billy Bowlegs, Jean Lafitte and Gasparilla preceded the Ghost Ship, raiding Spanish treasure and merchant ships and occasionally attacking the ports of St. Augustine and San Marcos de Apalache (St. Mark’s). By 1900, the pirates’ targets had evolved to slave, merchant and fishing vessels and smuggling was yet another avenue to riches. It was at about this time the Ghost Ship took off after a quick merchant vessel, which led them a merry chase. Both ships were near Cape Florida when the pirates finally managed to run down their prey and force the merchantmen to surrender.
Outraged at the length of the chase and the resistance of the crew, the pirate captain forced every one of them to walk the plank, saving the captain for last and forcing his wife to watch. Filled with rage and righteous indignation, the woman fell to her knees, raised her arms above her head and called upon God to punish her captors for their evil deeds.
At that moment, a curling line of foam swept down over the calm expanse, lifted both vessels in its embrace and carried them away. The ships were taken inland atop a giant tidal wave and the merchant vessel smashed to smithereens while the pirate ship was left stranded deep in the twisting channels and grasslands of the Glades, its inhabitants dying off one by one from fever and starvation. Indians and hunters tell of seeing the Ghost Ship even today with its rotting masts and sails, still trying to find a channel out of the sawgrass pools, calling out to them for directions and inviting them aboard for a snort of grog. So far, only fellow privateer Farnell Cole has visited the ship and lived to tell about it. And rest assured, he will.
The Sawgrass Triangle
On December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air station on a routine training mission, never to return. The legendary status of the flight 19 Lost Patrol is a cornerstone of the Bermuda Triangle myth but many aviation experts believe the planes crashed in the Everglades.
On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 from JFK to Miami took a nosedive into the Everglades, killing all 101 people aboard. The plane’s wreckage was found and some of its parts were salvaged and used for other planes, which are said to be haunted by passengers of Flight 401.
On May 11, 1996, a ValuJet Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-9 crashed into the Glades about ten minutes after departing from Miami, supposedly as a result of a fire in the cargo area. All ten people aboard were killed.
Uncharted, overgrown and little known, the three-acre settlement of the Glades’ Lost City holds many secrets and offers few answers. Once an apparent Seminole settlement, the place was abandoned abruptly by its occupants for unknown reasons with a large range of artifacts left behind, including a canoe and a distilling vessel that were between one- and two-thousand years old. There are ancient ruins in the Lost City and several crumbling cabins remain. One tale has it that Al Capone used the area to produce moonshine for a clandestine bootleg liquor operation in the 1930s; at the time, Big Al owned a saloon and dance hall just off the Tamiami Trail.
Finally, the Everglades is supposedly home to cryptids, the first being the Skunk Ape, a Sasquatch-like creature covered in red hair who’s 7 feet tall in his gym socks and stinks to high heaven. The other is a half-gator, half human the locals call Gator Man. If the latter sounds extremely far-fetched, consider that Randall Roffe hasn’t been heard from lately and has often been known to take refuge in very remote areas.
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| No more Watson's Paydays. |
They Say Don’t Go On Chokoloskee Island
‘Cause Clifton Clowers has a pretty young daughter. He’s mighty handy with a gun and a knife.”---Claude King
Shit happens in the Everglades. People walk in, disappear and never come out. Murders are less shocking in the Glades, even when the victims are well-known people. In 1974, Amy Billing was last observed hitchhiking down a murky Glades road and was never seen again. In 1998, Wendy Hudakoc snuck out her bedroom window to attend a party and promptly disappeared forever. In 2009, seven-year-old Adji Desir was playing in the front yard of his grandmother’s house until he wasn’t. Could happen anywhere, you say. Sure, you’re right. But there so many more, starting long, long ago.
In the 1880s, Edgar Watson moved to Chokoloskee Island in the Everglades and quickly got to work building a sugar cane empire. Watson was an odd man, an eccentric, and soon after he arrived rumors began to spread that he moved to the island after killing a host of people. What made the rumors even more believable was a drunken fight Watson had with a fellow islander in which he slashed the other man’s throat. His opponent barely survived but no charges were pressed and Watson’s wealth kept him out of jail.
Watson’s reputation got even worse when laborers started disappearing from his property. The locals suspected Watson was killing them at the work season’s end and dumping them in the Everglades so he didn’t have to pay them. The islanders referred to the deaths as “a Watson payday.” Eventually, evidence of the crimes surfaced and the town got up a posse to confront Watson. He denied everything, of course, but then made the egregious mistake of raising his gun and trying to fire. Alas, he had purposely been sold waterlogged bullets by a suspicious townsperson and the weapon didn’t function. The posse had better bullets and opened a can of whoop-ass on their oppressor, riddling his body with bulletholes. “We don’t need no stinking badges,” opined one of the gunmen. He was right, nobody cared. Non-Glades law enforcement just whistled past the grave and The Great Swamp swallowed up one more victim, wrote yet another dark tale for its lexicon of evil lore.
Next time you’re looking for a thrill ride, stick with Disney World. Wolverton Mountain is Coney Island compared to the Florida Everglades. Snap-snap. Munch-munch. Bang-bang.
That’s all, folks….
