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Manatees cannot survive long in water below about sixty-eight degrees, so from November to March they crowd into the springs and the warm-water outflows, and that is when you see them in numbers.
Three Sisters Springs at Crystal River in Citrus County is the only place in the country where you are permitted to swim with them under supervision. Homosassa Springs nearby has an underwater observatory. Blue Spring State Park in Volusia County counts hundreds on a cold morning from a boardwalk. Manatee Lagoon in Palm Beach County and the Tampa Electric viewing center in Hillsborough both sit beside power plant outflows. Manatee Park in Lee County is the same idea. In summer the animals scatter and you are as likely to meet one from a kayak anywhere on the coast.
Citrus County. Three Sisters Springs is at 917 Three Sisters Springs Trail in Crystal River, and getting there takes a small amount of planning. There is no public parking on site unless you hold a disabled parking permit.
Open the guide →Citrus County. People have been coming to this spring since the early 1900s, when a railroad along what is now Fishbowl Drive would put passengers off to walk down and look at it.
Open the guide →Volusia County. About 102 million gallons of water come out of it every day at a steady seventy-three degrees. That warmth is the whole point in winter. When the river drops below the mid-sixties, manatees move into the spring run to keep from dying of cold, and from November through March the park closes the water to swimmers, divers and paddlers so the animals are left alone.
Open the guide →Palm Beach County. Manatee Lagoon sits beside Florida Power & Light's Riviera Beach Next Generation Clean Energy Center, and the manatees come for that plant's warm-water outflow rather than for anything the center itself provides.
Open the guide →Hillsborough County. Tampa Electric's Big Bend Power Station draws cooling water from Tampa Bay and returns it clean and warm to a discharge canal. Manatees cannot survive long in cold water, and since the plant began running they have crowded into that canal every winter.
Open the guide →Lee County. The Florida Power and Light plant next door discharges warm water into the Orange River, and manatees crowd into it through the cold months because sustained water below sixty-eight degrees will kill them.
Open the guide →St. Lucie County. The center sits at 480 North Indian River Drive on Moore's Creek, a lagoon inlet beside a marina and a few steps from downtown Fort Pierce. Manatees use the creek through the year rather than only in winter, which is unusual, though they are wild and nobody promises a sighting.
Open the guide →Levy County. William Bartram came here in 1774, saw a dead manatee on the bank, and wrote the place up as Manate Springs; the name stuck. The spring holds at seventy-two degrees and that is why the manatees come, moving up the run from the Suwannee in fall and winter when the river turns cold, with roughly a hundred sightings logged in a year.
Open the guide →Florida beaches carry most of the loggerhead nesting in the western hemisphere and the season runs from March to October, with hatchlings from late June.
Bottlenose dolphins live year round in almost every bay, pass and inlet in Florida, and the sheltered water is where you actually see them.
Florida sits on the Atlantic flyway with the Gulf on one side, so it carries both resident wading birds and everything passing through.
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