An American Original - southeastern Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp

National Wildlife, August-Sept, 1999 by Les Line

By the early 1970s, when Russell's classic book on the swamp was published, alligator populations throughout the Okefenokee and across the southeastern United States had been decimated by hide hunters to make fashionable handbags and shoes. Howard Hunt, curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta, remembers that when he first visited the swamp in 1965, he saw piles of bleached gator bones along the only road into the interior. A federal- government clampdown put the poachers out of business, and today the refuge has a healthy number of alligators--as many as 12,000--though presumably a lot fewer than in historic times.

The swamp's other formidable creature is the black bear, and Hunt's research, which includes the use of surveillance cameras, revealed that Ursus americanus is the primary predator of Okefenokee alligator nests. A female alligator typically deposits around 30 eggs in the middle of a four-foot-high mound of vegetation, which she scrapes together with her feet while backing in a circle around the nest site. But her work often goes for naught.

Hunt monitored 129 nests over a 13- year period and found that 69 percent of them were lost to all predators during the six-week crucial incubation period. In one of his study areas, the figure was 93 percent, the highest ever reported. In contrast, the predation rate on alligator nests in one Florida Everglades survey was only about 7 percent.

'The Okefenokee is one of the few places where you get lots of bears and alligators in the same place,' says Hunt. He suggests that while nest-guarding female gators will rout marauding raccoons or otters and sometimes bluster at human intruders without attacking, they're 'reluctant to do all-out battle with a bigger predator. Otherwise we would find alligators ripped to shreds or bears with serious injuries.' When the intrepid scientist donned a black bear costume and approached one alligator nest on all fours, the female lurking nearby submerged and swam away for a consid- erable distance. 'They do what's the least hazardous to their health,' Hunt adds. 'They can always make another nest.' Cyndy Loftin has never prowled the prairies in a rented fur suit. Among other things, she was always busy monitoring two dozen water-level recorders. However, her study of the swamp's hydrology, vegetation and related refuge-management issues was not as ho- hum as it might sound. In fact, her findings will lead to the correction of a serious mistake that was once ordained by the U.S. Congress.

The Okefenokee is one of the best-preserved wetlands in America, but humans have left more than footprints. In the 1890s, a scheme to drain, log and then farm the swamp was aborted when the money ran out after steam shovels had dug 12 miles of the Suwannee Canal. In 1909, loggers built a railroad trestle deep into the swamp and took out 430 million board feet of cypress before the easily accessible timber ran out.

And after wildfires in 1954-55 burned 80 percent of the refuge along with thousands of acres of the high-value pine plantations that surround it, Congress attempted to solve future fire problems by ordering construction of an earthen levee--the Suwannee River Sill-- 'to prevent drainage of the Okefenokee Swamp during periods of drought.' At the time no one understood that only 20 percent of the water leaves as stream flow and 80 percent as plant evapotranspiration. Indeed, most of the area has no perceptible water movement like the sheet flow of the Everglades to the south.