This morning I drove from my hotel in Miami to a northern Everglades site called Shark Valley.  No, there aren’t any sharks there, though there are lots and lots of gators (an important consideration: see below).  There also tend to be lots of birds, though just as on the Anhinga Trail I find the backgrounds to be a bit too distracting for fine-art photography.  Nevertheless, I’d been hearing good things about this site from other photographers on my first two days and decided to give this site another chance.  The map below shows you how to get there.


    The road through the park is extremely long, and loops around to come back to the parking lot (not shown in the map).  It’s a pedestrian-only road, but you can take a tramcar tour that does the whole loop.  I never have.  In fact, I’ve never been more than about 100 yards down the road.  Other photographers I’ve met at this site have assured me that most of the bird activity is to be seen close to the parking lot, so there’s little need to go very far down the road.  I don’t know for sure if this is true.
    My main subjects at Shark Valley this year were the purple gallinules.  This is a bird that I wasn’t able to get many photos of last year, despite my strong interest in doing so (I’d never even seen one before last year’s trip). 



These are very small birds that creep about through the swamp, walking on lily pads and other low vegetation.  I personally think they’re very cool.  Watching them hunt is never boring for me.  Getting eye-level images like the one shown above requires you to get low with your lens, preferably on your belly at the water’s edge.  The main problem with that approach here is the everpresent gators.  This year I did have one brief encounter with a gator that had sneaked up and surprised me, causing me to jump and scurry up the bank of the canal.  The other people who observed the interaction laughed, but I don’t think any close encounter with a dangerous animal is funny.  People have lost limbs to gators in Florida.  That’s no laughing matter.



Apart from the gallinules, the other main attraction for me at Shark Valley is the ready availability of fish-capture shots.  You can easily get images of anhingas and various species of egrets and herons with freshly caught fish:



Other highlights at Shark Valley this year included a nest with two young anhingas (see below).  Today there were lots of  little blue herons, some green herons, tons of anhingas, a tricolored, and an actively hunting great blue.  An active snowy egret (a favorite species of mine) was hunting on the wing over the water, but getting a good exposure, even with cloud cover, proved too difficult for me (i.e., the contrast between the white bird and its dark background challenged my sense of aesthetics).



Around noon the bird activity suddenly dropped to near zero, so I hit the road.  I drove back to the keys and hit the Wild Bird Center again.  I spent several hours on the boardwalk waiting to get the egret fly-in at feeding time, but didn’t get anywhere near as many flight shots as I wanted.  On the way back from feeding the pelicans (on the beach), the center’s owner saw me waiting for the egrets to become active, and she instructed her men to get some more fish from the shack so she could stir them up for me.  But her men gave it to the pelicans that were amassed there, rather than to the egrets, so I didn’t get any really great flight shots of the egrets today.  That’s a real shame, because the opportunity to get spontaneous egret flight shots are what made me want to return to this site.



I decided it was time to advance my schedule and move further north, past Naples.  The overall lack of bird activity that I’ve been seeing this year (relative to last year) has me a bit worried that maybe I’ve come too late this year.