Florida’s Wild Flamingos: The Native Bird That Came Home
For decades people assumed Florida’s flamingos were escapees from racetracks and zoos. New science says otherwise: the flamingo is native to Florida, and it is slowly coming back.
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Big Cypress: The Wild Swamp Next Door to the Everglades
One of America’s first two national preserves protects 729,000 acres of cypress, prairie, and some of the darkest night skies in the eastern United States, right beside the Everglades.
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The Everglades: River of Grass, the Book That Saved a Wilderness
One sentence changed how the world saw the Everglades. Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 classic reframed a swamp as a river worth saving, and helped do exactly that.
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Clyde Butcher: The Man Who Made America See the Everglades in Black and White
He wades chest-deep through cypress swamps carrying a 70-pound camera to capture what most people drive past at 60 mph. Clyde Butcher’s massive black-and-white prints have done more for Everglades conservation than almost any photograph ever taken.
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Adaptation: The Wild Everglades Film That Won an Oscar by Getting Wonderfully Lost
Spike Jonze and Nicolas Cage venture deep into the Florida Everglades in this brilliant 2002 film about orchid obsession, swamp beauty, and the creative madness of trying to capture Florida on screen.
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Swamp Story: Dave Barry’s Most Florida Novel Yet
Dave Barry’s hilarious Everglades novel follows a single mom who finds buried treasure, a fake swamp monster that goes viral on TikTok, and a presidential campaign that goes sideways.
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Fakahatchee Strand: Florida’s 85,000-Acre Amazon
Deep in Collier County, an 85,000-acre swamp shelters ghost orchids, Florida panthers, and the only forest on Earth where bald cypress and royal palms share a canopy. Welcome to the Fakahatchee Strand.
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Shadow Country: The National Book Award Winner Set in Florida’s Wildest Frontier
Peter Matthiessen spent three decades writing about Edgar J. Watson, a real-life sugarcane planter who terrorized the Ten Thousand Islands. Shadow Country won the National Book Award and remains one of the most ambitious novels ever set in Florida.
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Bright Lit Place: The Podcast That Tells the Whole Everglades Story
WLRN reporter Jenny Staletovich traces the tangled history of the Everglades, from early drainage schemes to the largest hydrological restoration effort in American history. Essential listening for anyone who wants to understand South Florida.
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Airboat Rides: The Flat-Bottomed, Fan-Powered Way Florida Does a Boat Tour
No rudder, no propeller in the water – just a giant fan and a flat bottom that skims across the Everglades at 40 miles per hour. Airboat rides are one of Florida’s most iconic and exhilarating ways to see the wild interior.
