Zen and the Art of Finding Wildlife

Florida can be hot as hell. After months of winter in Yellowstone and the boreal forest of Minnesota, landing on the Gulf Coast this past spring, with the heat and sun and humidity levels so high the locals were out walking their goldfish on leashes, my body struggled to catch up. Along the white sandy beaches of pulverized limestone, the breeze that rolls in off the Gulf of Mexico is paradisical. The waters this time of year dry out the air. But I wasn't on the beach. I was inland. Swamps. Mosquitoes. Venomous snakes. Alligators. And, well, I'm sure you git the gist of it.

This stretch of the Gulf Coast is where things begin to transition from subtropical to tropical. Technically, that’s not true. The tropics begin and end with very specific latitudes known as the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn - otherwise known as 23.5 degrees north and 23.5 degrees south. I was at 27 degrees north, a long way off from the Tropic of Cancer. But that great thermal mass we call the Gulf of Mexico, with an average temperature of 80 degrees F, allows for a strange glimpse into another world.

Strangler figs entangle sable palms, sending down their roots from seeds left in the canopy by birds, twisting around, enveloping, and strangling the host tree. Gumbo limbo trees abound, especially the closer to the coast you get, and with strange flaking bark these tropical hardwoods are also known as the tourist tree – because they look like they are red and peeling. Black headed parrots and monk parakeets build colonial nests beneath flood lights at soccer fields, while iguanas bask in the sun amidst the red flowers of Brazilian peppers. Welcome to the new Pangea.

The further you move away from the life-giving waters of the Gulf, however, the more “North American” the biota becomes. The non-native royal palms that frame highways filled with Range Rovers and Aston Martins give way to southern live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Cabbage palms mix with saw palmettos mix with sable palms mix with laurel oaks. Red shouldered hawks are prolific, hunting red saddlebag dragonflies on the wing. Endangered gopher tortoises waddle across the open prairies that lie between the seemingly impenetrable oak and palm hammocks, whose shadowy realm is like metaphorically peering into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

After being issued a grocery list of warnings the day before from a local photographer about venturing into these hammocks wearing nothing more than a pair of Chaco sandals on my feet - something about eastern diamondbacks (the largest venomous snake in North America) and pygmy rattlesnakes (the smallest venomous snake in North America) - I ducked under a tangle of muscadine grape vines as thick as my forearm and stepped into the shadow realm.

Scattered shafts of light penetrated the overstory of the forest. It’s dark, it’s humid, and thanks to the almost complete lack of light, the ground is covered by little more than the skeletons of dead trees and a foot of leaf litter. With no light reaching the forest floor, all life seems to be crowded about high in the canopy. Bromeliads and orchids cover the long and sprawling branches of the live oaks. Epiphytes, such as the cardinal and pineapple air plants, both of which are endangered species, can be seen overhead amongst carpets of resurrection ferns who live and die by the rains each week.

The region was experiencing a drought. Rivers were low. Lakes were low. And each footstep in the leaf litter sounded almost explosive. These are the dead and dried out leaves of live oaks, hard, and waxy, brittle from the lack of water on the ground, and completely unlike the soft and supple fallen leaves of your typical deciduous oak. This was a problem. The task at hand was not a simple one because we had no idea where the owls might be. Each step sent out a loud and sharp crack into the deafening silence of the forest still waiting out the heat of the day.

The night before, I had followed the territorial call and response of a barred owl pair to the edge of this hammock. It was already dark, and we were exhausted, covered in mud and sopping wet from 4 hours lying prostrate and motionless in a freshwater bullrush marsh photographing sandhill cranes as they flew in to roost for the night. But the call of the owls told us all we needed to know. This was the core territory of a mated pair. And being the first week of April, they were likely to be harboring a brood of owlets.

We had no idea where they might be in the hammock. This time of the year, this far south, owlets would have branched by now. Barred owls, like many species of owls, are cavity nesters, often taking over the abandoned homes of pileated woodpeckers and modifying it to their needs. In one meta-analysis of scientific research done over the last century on barred owls, it was found that barred owls preferred cavities, whether abandoned woodpeckers or natural, 74.8% of the time. But the owlets have no interest staying cooped up inside such nesting cavities. As soon as they are capable, they climb out onto surrounding branches. And from there, it’s just a matter of days before they begin to move from tree to tree, exploring their ability to flutter and “coast” through the air, as they learn the physics of flight. This means that the owls and their owlets could be anywhere within this 50-acre section of forest. Or not. We could be wrong. Maybe no owlets are here at all. Maybe it was just a pair of owls hooting it up the night before, the excitement and passion of young love in the night.

Situations like this demand a certain mastery of reading the signs of the natural world. Owls are everywhere. In the United States, there are some 18 different species of owls. They can be found in every forest, in every patch of suburban woods. Yet, how often do you just walk out into the woods and find an owl?