Biscayne Bay National Park

Thursday, February 2, 2017

We slept in a bit on Thursday morning since our boat trip wasn't until 1:30 PM. After breakfast and showers, we were fed, clean and ready to roll. It was almost a straight line from the Everglades to the Biscayne Bay National Park Visitor Center.

We hoped to do some birding and were there well before lunch. After a stop at the visitor center to buy the boat tickets, we walked along the shoreside trail. We saw Brown Pelicans, Royal Terns and cormorants, with a smattering of various gulls and a couple of Anhinga. In the distance, on an anchored powerboat, a Great Egret was perched on their flybridge. Quite a few people come to the visitor center area to picnic and fish from the shore but I didn't see anyone catch anything.

We chatted a bit with the volunteers in the visitor center about their accommodations. We had noticed three RVs in the back of the parking lot and, sure enough, that is the volunteer site for the park's landside facilities. There are also a couple of volunteer harbormasters out on the keys, one has a cabin and the other stays aboard his boat. Here's a volunteer assignment that our boating friends would love!

At 1:30 a big power catamaran arrived to take us out onto the bay. Of course, most of the park is underwater with the exception of several keys offshore. The boat trip goes to one of them, Boca Chita Key, spends about an hour there and returns. It took us a while to get out to the key as the skipper spotted a couple of pods of Bottlenose Dolphins and detoured to see them up close. He would circle around the pod at a good clip and the dolphins would come close and ride in the wake, occasionally leaping out of the water. We also detoured over a wrecked shrimp boat which is quite close to the surface. The depths on the way across never went much below 10 feet, so this wreck was easily seen. It teemed with schools of fairly large fish, mostly Blue Parrotfish and Snapper. I would have thought someone would definitely be fishing this wreck (perhaps fishing is not allowed in the park, but they do allow crab traps).

We finally got to Boca Chita Key with only about an hour to explore. It wasn't very large, but there were some paths into the mangroves that might have been interesting with a bit more time. Boca Chita was originally developed by a group of wealthy Miami residents as a place to get away on their yachts. It has a large boat basin, a faux lighthouse (with a lighthouse passport stamp, no less) and a couple of small buildings. A landscaped park extends across a large swath of the key. Now that it is part of the National Park, it is a popular weekend destination by boaters. They evidently fill the boat basin two deep every weekend and party. It is $20/night to moor at the boat basin. Anchoring out is not allowed. A large section of the basin wall is reserved for police vessels only, so I expect there is enough of a presence to keep things from getting out of hand.

We spent our hour strolling about spotting what birds we could see. There were White Ibis on the lawns, Ruddy Turnstones in a gravel patch at the side of the grass, several woodpeckers, a kestrel and the usual collection of cormorants, pelicans, gulls and terns along the bayside seawall. The birds of the day, however, were four Magnificent Frigatebirds which flew over the key.

We didn't tarry on the way back as we'd arrived at the key a bit late and the tour was supposed to end at 4:30. On the way into the vistor center marina, we spotted a final new bird, a single Caspian Tern.

Back to the Everglades, our next stop was the Royal Palm area and the Anhinga Trail. There was a ranger-led, after dark, starlight walk on the Anhinga Trail, looking for alligators and other beasties in the dark. It sounded interesting.

We got back to the park about an hour before the walk and decided to just park at the Royal Palm parking lot and make dinner there as the light faded.

By the time the walk started at 7:30, it was quite dark with just enough moonlight to see the trail. The ranger had a bright flashlight for illuminating the water and wetlands beyond the canal. He would occasionally light up an alligator. Its eyes would relfect back and all you could see were the glowing eyes. The walk was a little crowded with 31 but the glowing eyes were pretty cool.

As we got up to the area where the trail is a boardwalk over the lake (a large borrow pit), we could see down into the water by flashlight and easily pick out the fish, mostly Florida Gar, a long pointy-nosed armored relic of a fish, a favorite gator meal. We could also pick out alligators swimming along. They are quite active at night, feeding and partying off in the swamp.

The highlight was a large gator that swam along with the group at we walked down the boardwalk. The water was so clear that we could see the whole gator swimming. It rarely used its legs, mostly propelling itself with its tail. When we stopped, it swam right up to us and under the boardwalk to the other side. Fortunately, we were well above the gator.

We'd hoped that there would be more to see than gators and fish ... like maybe an owl. There were some owlish looking silhouettes but they turned out to be sleeping Anhinga, who seem to tuck their heads completely out of sight and the rest of the body resembles an owl. But we were glad we'd taken the walk, even if it was a bit crowded.

Photos