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Florida sits on the Atlantic flyway with the Gulf on one side, so it carries both resident wading birds and everything passing through.
J N Ding Darling on Sanibel in Lee County is the one birders name first, with a wildlife drive timed to the falling tide. Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Brevard County wraps around the space center and holds the same numbers. St Marks in Wakulla County is the Panhandle equivalent. Pelican Island in Indian River County was the first national wildlife refuge in the country, created in 1903. Corkscrew Swamp in Collier County has a boardwalk through old cypress with nesting wood storks. Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive in Lake County records more species in a morning than most sites do in a week.
Lee County. President Truman set the ground aside by executive order in 1945 as the Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge. It was renamed in 1967 for Jay Norwood Darling, a newspaper cartoonist who wintered on Captiva and who used his standing in Washington to stop the sale of Sanibel land to developers.
Open the guide →Brevard County. Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge covers 140,000 acres of coastal dune, saltwater marsh and estuary about 60 miles east of Orlando, established in 1963 to protect migratory birds. It exists as an overlay of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and under that agreement the land serves the space program first and the refuge second.
Open the guide →Wakulla County. Turn off US 98 at Newport onto Lighthouse Road, County Road 59, and drive three miles to the visitor center at 1255 Lighthouse Road. It opens Monday through Friday from eight in the morning until four, and on weekends from ten until five, closed on federal holidays.
Open the guide →Indian River County. Plume hunters were shooting the birds off this island for the hat trade. Paul Kroegel, a German immigrant boat builder who lived across the water and watched it happen, took to standing guard with a shotgun, and the campaign he became part of reached the president.
Open the guide →Collier County. A boardwalk two and a quarter miles long carries you through it without a foot touching the ground, and that boardwalk is the point of the place: the swamp stands in water for much of the year and there is no other honest way in.
Open the guide →Lake County. The drive opens Friday, Saturday, Sunday and federal holidays, from seven in the morning until three, with everyone out by five. The speed limit is ten miles an hour, vehicles over twenty-five feet and trailers are not allowed, and the whole thing takes one to three hours depending on how often you stop.
Open the guide →Palm Beach County. Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee protects the northernmost remnant of the Everglades, and at more than 145,000 acres the refuge describes itself as one of the largest urban wildlife refuges in the country.
Open the guide →Okeechobee County. This is the largest tract of Florida dry prairie left, a habitat shaped by flood and fire that once covered much of the peninsula and now survives in fragments; it forms part of the headwaters of the Everglades.
Open the guide →Alachua County. The prairie is a shallow basin that floods and drains, and the state made it Florida's first preserve rather than a park because the point is the land itself. It runs to nearly 23,000 acres south of Gainesville, holding twenty separate biological communities in one place, from wet prairie and marsh to hammock and pine.
Open the guide →Alligators are in fresh and brackish water in all 67 counties, so the question is where you can watch them safely from dry land.
Silver Springs in Marion County ran the first glass-bottom boats anywhere, from 1878, and they still run over the same spring vents, where the water is clear enough to read the bottom thirty feet down and the boats pass over sunken film sets left from the Tarzan and Sea Hunt years.
Airboats run on the shallow marsh where a propeller cannot, which in Florida means the Everglades and the headwater lakes and prairies north of them.
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