u/TrainerPublic

Some context on what this map shows. Every pin is a research grade community sighting of an American crocodile, not an alligator. The dense cluster around Flamingo and Florida Bay is the heart of the population, with a second corridor running up through Biscayne Bay past the Turkey Point cooling canals. That part is the familiar story.

The part that surprised me is the strays. Fort Lauderdale. Delray. Everglades City on the west coast. When I broke the last decade of records down by area, the share of crocodile reports coming from outside the traditional core areas roughly doubled, from about 12 percent in 2016 to about 23 percent last year. Young crocs are dispersing and turning up in canals well north of where the textbooks put them.

Worth knowing before anyone cheers or panics: sightings measure encounters, not population. And the federal recovery plan is more cautious than the comeback headlines. It reports that overall nesting has declined, names sea level rise as an ongoing threat to nesting habitat that sits inches above the tide line, and says the species needs stable breeding populations at North Key Largo, Flamingo, and northeast Florida Bay to stay on track. So the picture is animals spreading out while the breeding heartland gets squeezed.

From a few hundred animals in 1975 to roughly 2,000 today, downlisted from endangered to threatened in 2007. Still the only crocodile most Americans will ever see wild, and Flamingo marina is still the most reliable place to see one respectfully, from a distance.

Data notes: iNaturalist deliberately blurs croc coordinates to protect a threatened species, so pins are approximate within their general area. Counts current as of this month.

I swear to God if they think a shadeless palm tree is a suitable replacement

At this pace, hanging out in Coconut Grove will be as pleasant as hanging out at Hard Rock stadium parking lot mid summer.

Saw this coyote walking around S. River Dr and 72nd ave area in Hialeah. Just a heads up for anyone walking pets or out early. Has anyone else been seeing coyotes around Hialeah lately?

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.

Caught the fires in Miami whilst flying in from Guatemala!