WANTED: Mangrove Cuckoo
I’m waist-deep in water the color of over-steeped tea, feet sinking into the soft, sucking mud of the coastal Everglades. My wet, salty pants chafe miserably at the back of my legs. All around me stand red mangroves, aerial roots spreading out like the legs of some enormous spider. Stretched across a low branch just above the water is a mangrove salt marsh snake, warming itself in the morning’s first rays of sun.
No car horns, no rumble of outboard motors, no sign or sounds of people at all, in fact; just the steady drone of insects and the rattling whinny of a Red-bellied Woodpecker. The contrail of a jet across the thin blue strip of sky above me is the only reminder that I’m here in present-day Florida, deep in a small tributary of the Shark River, along the state’s southwest coast.
It isn’t quite 7 a.m., but the late-April heat is already suffocating. No breeze. Rivulets of sweat run down my forehead and into my eyes. I’d rub them, but I’m wearing vinyl gloves and am completely zipped into my bug suit.
