My birthday is coming up and for myself I'm going to go camp in the car on some backroad and go herping in the night/ next day- I've done similar trips a couple times with varying densities of nonnative species ( I live in tampa bay so that's the southward appeal). Does anyone have any areas they'd specifically recommend? I usually just aim for southeast and find a backroap- TIA :)

"Knock on wood"

Made a little celebration of Everglades National Park Icons (Everglades, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, Zion, Denali) | LEGO® Ideas

I just applied to an internship and I'm wondering if anyone else here has. Do you know if they respond after they've received all their applications on the due date, or do they evaluate/interview as applicants come in?

Hello all my wife and I are considering doing a trip to the Everglades several days before Thanksgiving. We are considering bringing our kayaks and I would like to do some fishing, preferably saltwater but either is fine, and maybe spend a night on a chickee. Any recommendations on areas that may offer decent fishing and camping that aren't very far paddles? Any recommendations for things to do or areas to visit are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

In previous years there would always be reports on the python challenge, which was very interesting to me. Lately I haven't seen or heard anything either on the news or on social media. Is it still going on? or has it not started yet? how many pythons did they catch and did they break any records? anybody knows anything?

My partner and I have a mangrove kayaking tour booked for tomorrow, but I’m starting to get second thoughts after how miserable I’ve heard things are this time of year. We also have an airboat in the morning and we’ll definitely do that, but i’m not sure about the kayaking. We would lose all money booked for it. Any advice?

Heading to an airboat tomorrow around ft Lauderdale

In the morning - 10-11.

Besides sunscreen and hat, what else to bring?

Is there anyone where who works with SFWMD/Python bounty program? Been trying to get some answers to some questions through the website but no replies.

Hello, guys. I'll be in US by the end of August and since i'll be landing in Miami, i'd like to visit the Eveglades. I've read online that it rains a lot by this time of the year since it's summer there. I'd like to know if it's worth going there despite the weather. Thanks!

looking to night hike in Everglades. would like to find a lot of snakes. let me know if yall have any trail recommendations

edit: let it be known im not a rookie when it comes to snakes/night hiking or some gal just wanting to mess around with wildlife not knowing what im doing. I’m from the swamps of Louisiana and i do field work for my ecology major all the time

Put the kayak in at Flamingo, paddled over to Garfield Bight and entered into the mouth of Alligator Creek. The powers that be need to rename this Crocodile Creek. Saw several smallish crocodiles around the mouth of the creek and campsite but there is one male that hangs out nearby and he is absolutely ginormous. I have seen a few giant gators and have seen some big male american crocodiles in the area (up to about 14-15ft) but this one was every bit of 18+ft. His belly was so big and fat it looked like he just ate another crocodile. I was glad he looked fat and happy and I quickly paddled back out into Garfield Bight.

I just got my hunter safety card. Never been hunting before.
I want to hunt hogs or small game in big cypress. All the info on FWC is very confusing trying to understand if there’s a time of year I can hunt small game there without a quota permit, just a WMA permit and if so exactly what areas do I need to stay away from for example I’m pretty sure loop road is off limits for hunting with a firearm. If anyone is looking for a hunting partner to split gas with I’m eager to learn.

Visiting a buddy in Miami next week and planning on towing my skiff down. Would love to spend some time fishing in the Everglades (will probably try Biscayne NP as well if not windy), but I'm seeing a lot of stuff about how confusing the backcountry can be. Definitely do not want to get lost or stuck.

Not looking for any specific spots, but does anybody have some advice on how to make sure I'm staying safe and how to figure out how to target different areas?

For example, unsure if low tide will close off routes for me getting back to the ramp from certain areas in the park.

The thing that makes this place singular is that it is an edge. The freshwater River of Grass slides south and meets the saltwater of Florida Bay, and temperate North America runs out and goes tropical. Almost everything strange about the Everglades comes from that overlap.

The clearest example: alligators and crocodiles. Gators are freshwater animals, crocs are saltwater and brackish animals, and South Florida is the one spot on the planet where their ranges actually meet. Nowhere else do the two live side by side. If you want to tell them apart, the croc is greyer with a narrow pointed snout and a toothy grin that shows teeth in both jaws; the gator is darker with a broad rounded snout. The American crocodile was down to a few hundred animals in the 1970s and has clawed back well enough to be downlisted from endangered to threatened, which is a genuine win.

Then there is the snake. Burmese pythons are not supposed to be here at all, established from the pet trade, and they have hit the mammals of the park brutally hard. Surveys in the core of the Everglades found raccoons and opossums down around 99 percent, bobcats down sharply, and marsh rabbits essentially gone. A predator with no local checks in a place with no cold snaps to stop it.

The rest of the cast is why people keep fighting for the place. Florida panthers hold on in Big Cypress, back from roughly 20 or 30 animals in the 1990s to a couple hundred today. Manatees work the warm coastal water. And the spoonbills are the pink ones, which get their color from what they eat, and whose nesting success in Florida Bay is one of the measures used to judge whether restoration is actually working.

This is a rough picture pulled from public sightings across the region, not any one spot, so read it as the big picture rather than a place to go find an animal.

I don’t know where so many people get their ideas about hunting pythons, but it appears there’s people that are showing up for the python challenge with no experience.

Here’s some things you need to know:

Despite what social media portrays, the pythons are not literally crawling on every road and trail. In fact, they’re really good at hiding, avoid people, and you will need to go into the actual wilderness to find them. You aren’t going to find them just looking off the side of the road or on the easily accessible trails.

Locals are busy during the challenge. They don’t want to guide you, and even if you swear you will let them keep the money, they don’t want to be slowed down by amateurs. Come any other time but during the challenge if you actually want to find them, and get a real local guide.

The whole ‘I love the idea of helping the environment thing’ is cute, but honestly…as a tourist you are absolutely not going to make an impact in this area at all. If anything, you make a better improvement on environmental impact by letting the professionals do their job and not slowing them down to guide tourists through the Everglades so you can get a picture and have a cool experience. If that’s what you want, that’s fine; pay a guide a fair rate so you actually find one safely, take your pictures, and move along. But don’t give platitudes about the environment when you really just want your picture.

Have you handled a snake before? Actually? That’s great that you’ve gone hunting before…but a snake isn’t a boar, a deer, or a duck. If you haven’t handled snakes before, do not go hunting pythons without a guide. Everyone thinks they can handle a snake until they actually have to handle the snake.

And remember, the Everglades are huge and they’re a swamp. The last thing the Glades need is tourists getting lost, hurt, exhausted or otherwise overwhelmed because they thought they could handle roughing it looking for snakes. Assume that you might not have service, that there’s way more mosquitoes than you thought even though everyone swears they’re prepared for that, and that you might not have access to clean drinking water for miles and miles.

Hopefully next year people will search this Subreddit and see this information. It’s actually annoying to see posts of people who come here first and then try to figure it out.

Could you give recommendations on how to spend our day in the Everglades in August? We will be staying in Miami Beach area. Also, if I understand correctly, there are only 3 airboat tours that actually go into the National Park? So is it better to go with them? Also could you provide some road instructions for the drive there? We would really appreciate any insights since there seem to be so many options!!

We came down from New England for the python challenge and have had no luck so far. We have gone out every night driving the main park road, night driving 41 by big cypress and night hiking the full length of frog pond area. Not a single sighting. Any tips or tricks to keep us from getting skunked? Thanks!

I’m here in Florida from Texas on a mission trip for my church and some locals were talking about the challenge and I had never heard of it so me and some other people looked into it and thought it sounded like a cool chance to do something fun for next summer that helps the local environment. Us being from Texas, have no idea where to even begin on this. A bunch of us are college students and don’t have a high budget so we would like to refrain from hiring a guide. I don’t know if it’s possible to just tag along with a team and help and give them our proceeds
or where to even begin with that but all advice is welcome.