Ding Darling

On the way to Captiva you pass 7,608 "acres of precious refuge" off the coast of Sanibel, part of the National Wildlife Refuge at the J.N. 'Ding' Darling Park.  Here you might see any number of 272 known species of birds, 60 species of reptiles and amphibians, 35 species of mammals, and 102 species of fish and 14 threatened or endangered species outright.  In other words, here down at the mixed waters of these islands in the Gulf of Mexico, you visit an absolute hotbed of wildlife.

Ding Darling himself was an interesting character, originally from Iowa, a syndicated political cartoonist and friends with Wisconsin's own Aldo Leopold in the 1930's, he turned his passion for fishing the Florida island waters into a passion for preservation at a time in American history when that idea didn't really exist, at least in mainstream culture: natural resources, in all its forms, was there for the taking, not the giving back to.

We got a kick out of this cartoon, located in the museum portion of the preserve, for its mocking of the zealously unrestricted hunter.  What Darling recognized even back at a time when these attitudes would have been exaggerated, was that unrestriction simply leads to extinction of species, and therefore there needed to be, he countered, certain parcels of land, water and air that were off limits to hunters and industry, or else we know the consequences.

The sign in the top photograph is at the trailhead of the Indigo trail, a beautifully kept gravel trail that moves through two miles of deep mangroves, lined on both sides by estuary creeks.  We came out at noon, under an overhead sun, and not a lot of wildlife was stirring, so we decided to walk back to the car and enter into the 4-mile long nature preserve drive, lined here by large and open waters surrounded by small island chains and teeming with flocking and feeding birds.

Near the end of the drive (air conditioned by this point in the rented car), we saw three cars pulled alongside the road and viewers gawking down at the edge of one of the pools.  We got out of the car and, down at the bottom of the small bank, finally our Florida alligator, sunning in the shallows as still as if it were a statue.

We peaked up over the edge of the bank and took our picture along with the handful of others.  As we stood in sort of half amazement and half fear, I looked over to the thick bushes about five feet to our right and saw a very dark shadow lying still in the heavy shade.  A second alligator. This one so well hidden nobody had yet seen it but we were all walking ever closer toward it in order to get our snapshots.  As I pointed out this second one to others, grandmothers began to briskly walk in the other direction and moms holding the hands of their little kids scooted back to their cars.  We slowly moonwalked back to our own car, a little shaky, but knowing we certainly saw the real thing.

At the head of Indigo Trail, Ding Darling