An American Original - southeastern Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp

National Wildlife, August-Sept, 1999 by Les Line

The Okefenokee Swamp's reputation as a forbidding place hasn't deterred stalwart scientists from probing the secrets of this national treasure Being desk-bound might seem like purgatory for a freshly minted wetlands ecologist. But Cyndy Loftin admits that after five years of field work in one of the wildest and soggiest landscapes in the lower 48 states--southeastern Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp--she was 'ready to get back on dry land' and face the chore of writing her Ph.D. dissertation and articles about her research for various scientific journals.

An American original, the Okefenokee is one of the world's great primitive

wilderness areas and wildlife preserves. For decades, people have used words like 'dark' and 'forbidding' to describe it--and not without justification. Perhaps that's why a lot of secrets about the swamp's ecology remain hidden. Told that one of her colleagues had called the swamp an 'inhospitable and dangerous' place to work, Loftin, a research associate with the Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, laughs and says, 'It depends on how badly you want to do a study.' Was Loftin worried about getting lost in a virtually trackless world of prairies, lakes, cypress stands and piney islands where alligators stare back at every glance? 'I carried a compass and knew that I could go north, south, east or west and eventually hit a canoe trail,' she says. But Loftin also vividly remembers the time when a helicopter pilot forgot where he had dropped her off. 'I knew where I was,' she recalls, 'and I had a radio, so I could hear the helicopter crew arguing about where to go.' From the air, the pieces of the Okefenokee mosaic have few hard edges.

'You know,' Loftin reflects with a touch of wistfulness, 'I really miss the place.' The Okefenokee Swamp, it seems, can get under your skin in more ways than one. There may be larger wetlands in North America and the world, but none are quite like the Okefenokee. An immense bog covering 770 square miles of the Atlantic coastal plain, the swamp sits 75 miles inland from the present Georgia shore. However, prevailing wisdom asserts that the saucer-shaped depression, which is tilted from the northwest to the southwest, was a salty lagoon behind a 40-mile-long sandbar until the ocean receded 250,000 years ago.

Today, the Okefenokee lies about 100 feet above sea level and the ancient sandbar on its eastern rim is now known as Trail Ridge. The ridge is a natural dam that confines rainfall--the source of 70 percent of the swamp's water--to the basin. There the water moves ever so slowly to the headwaters of both the Suwannee River, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico, and the St. Mary's River, which empties into the Atlantic. Trail Ridge also is a rich source of titanium minerals, deposited by ocean waves and winds. Those minerals were the reason for a proposed, controversial mining operation that became the latest threat to the swamp's integrity.

Peat deposits as thick as 15 feet cover the Okefenokee's sand bottom, and methane gas produced by the decay of sunken vegetation periodically propels large chunks of this compressed organic matter to the surface of open water areas. Most of these peat mats, some as long as 100 feet, will sink back to the bottom. However, a few of these 'floating islands' rapidly undergo succession to shrubby greenbrier tangles and then to swamp forests populated with bald cypress, loblolly bay and black gum trees.

But walking on one of these peat rafts, where you might sink to your waist without warning, is an unsettling experience. This accounts for an Indian word for the place ('Ekanfinada' on a map from 1790) that means 'trembling earth.' European families that settled on the upland islands and lived off the swamp in the mid-1800s pronounced it 'Oak-fin-oak' rather than the more euphonious 'Oaky-fen-oaky' one usually hears today.

The swampers, as these pioneers were known, also left their names on such places as Mixon's Hammock, Minnie's Lake, Craven's Island and Chesser Prairie. Note, though, that the Okefenokee's so-called prairies are covered with a foot or more of warm tannic tea and aquatic vegetation such as water lilies and bladderworts rather than windblown fields of bluestem grass and purple coneflowers. A high-and-dry Dakotan would call them marshes. They cover about 8 percent of the swamp, most of which lies within the boundaries of the largest national wildlife refuge east of the Mississippi River. In turn, most of Okefenokee Refuge, created in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is designated as a wilderness area No surprise: Animal and plant life abound in the Okefenokee. By latest count, the swamp hosts 234 species of birds, 49 mammals, 64 reptiles, 37 amphibians, 39 fishes and at least 621 plants.

The number of insect species is any entomologist's guess, but clearly it is huge. 'The Okefenokee is reputed to be a place of mystery and terror,' observed nature writer Franklin Russell, 'yet it is a world of millions of singing creatures and a garden of spectacular flower displays.' The swamp's loudest voice is the basso profundo of the American alligator. According to tales told over jars of moonshine, gators once were so abundant that people supposedly could walk across the swamp--25 miles east to west, 38 miles north to south--by stepping on the great reptiles' armored backs. 'No true Okefenokee man would have traveled anywhere in the swamp without carrying his gun and a pole shod with iron that he could use to beat back attacks on his boat by alligators seeking to seize his dogs,' Russell related.