Back Again, and Here All the Time

 Driving out of my island retreat in late February I saw my first swallow-tailed kite of the season, pretty much right on schedule. They may have been around, but I hadn't been out where I could see them. It made my heart glad. I will never tire of these elegant aerialists. They don't use just their tail-feathers and wings to navigate, but  also can turn their tail itself nearly 90 degrees, using it as a rudder, as they execute complicated maneuvers, rolls, and even backward dives. And they make it look effortless. Once aloft, they tend to ride the thermals all day, returning to the trees only at night, to roost. 

Ornithologist/artist David Allen Sibley describes them as, "Unmistakable; incredibly graceful, [with a ] flowing flight."(The Sibley Guide to Birds. Knopf. 4th printing Jan. 2001, p.111).

When mature, these raptors have white bodies with long, slender wings trimmed in black, and a long, forked black tail. They measure about 2 feet from bill to tail tip, and have a wingspan of a good 4 feet or more. They are fairly gregarious, and nest close together. 

There are 2  subspecies of Elanoides forficatus - one in the U.S., and one in Central and South America. The population in the States breeds in Florida, coastal Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina and parts of Texas. Their range in the U.S. used to extend up the Mississippi river all the way to Minnesota, but hunting and habitat loss have shrunk it drastically. They breed here in  late winter and then in July gather in large flocks for the return to South America. The Central and South America population stays put.

 They pluck their prey - mainly insects, reptiles and sometimes baby birds, from the treetops, and since the mangroves don't grow exceptionally tall here, it often is possible to get a good look at them as they hunt. They can eat, and even drink, on the wing. Unlike other raptors, they also will eat fruit. They are pretty adaptable - I  used to see them in heavily-populated suburban Miami, and I see them over populated areas in Naples as well. 

Apart from my own observations, I found information on these birds on the following websites:

American Bird Conservancy - abc.org

Cornell Lab - allaboutbirds.org

Florida Fish and Wildlife conservation Commission - myfwc.com."swallow-tailedkite"

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A few weeks after the filthy storm surge brought by Hurricane Ian in September of 2022, rendered all ground-hugging vegetation brown and dead, a few brave individual plants of blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium angustifolium, not only appeared, but actually bloomed. It was a little out of season for blooming, and I suspect it was triggered by the sudden kill-off - a desperate attempt to ensure that there would be a new generation.

The swale, where these diminutive iris thrive in my yard then became the staging ground for all the wallboard, furniture, appliances and personal belongings destroyed by the flood. That debris included sodden carpet, cans of chemicals, solvents, portable gas tanks,and other unimaginable, including half a pizza, that washed in from elsewhere. The FEMA claw trucks made regular runs, picking up this detritus with remarkable dexterity. As cleanup and demo continued, these piles of battered remnants of past lives regenerated with remarkable speed. The skill of the crane operators in maneuvering such colossal crude claws was impressive, as they managed to scrape up virtually every last piece of broken glass or plaster. Still it was in no way a delicate operation  - it was digging and scraping and leveling on a brutal scale.

Instead of creating a desert, though, this enormous soil disturbance brought thousands of seeds to the surface. Some of these "weeds" were actually desirable plants, just not here, and certainly not welcome in the wild abandon with which they grew. The blue-eyed grass seemed overwhelmed.

The massive pollution spread by the flood paradoxically seems to have had a fertilizing effect in my yard. To be sure, fertilizer itself can be a pollutant, but the wasteland I expected after the flood didn't materialize.  I had to pull out massive clumps of dune sunflower, Helianthus debilis,  one of my favorite natives, which rendered the rest of the yard impassible, repeatedly. 

I had to have the swale mowed - no way was I going to be able to hand-weed that mess. Mowing the swale made it look presentable - but it made the weeds bushier and denser. One of the plants taking over was a lovely little native legume called Pencil-flower, Stylosanthes sp. It grows wider than tall, and tends to be rather open when left alone, but it loved the mowing, getting much tighter and blooming like crazy.

I still  had to do something about noxious exotics vying for control, so hand-weeding had to accompany shearing after all, Even with gloves I get scratched up by the woody twigs of the pencil-flower. 

I wasn't even looking for it when I uprooted a clump of blue-eyed grass in one of my weeding sessions. Then I saw more...and more...and still more. All thriving and blooming like crazy. It was as though the plants, especially the pencil-flower, that I assumed had choked it out, had, instead, acted as a shelter from hot sun and clipper blades. The blue-eyed grass hadn't disappeared at all. It had been there all the time.

If I lived on Fort Myers Beach or Sanibel Island, which experienced catastrophic destruction, my story wouldn't necessarily have such a rosy ending. The Ding Darling Reserve on Sanibel opened only partly in February, 2024, then more fully in April of 2024. It was devastated by the wind and waves. 

Maybe the natural landscape is recovering. I hope so. Given a little space and time, it seems that what we like to call the natural order will try to reassert itself, cling to its rhythms, even heal itself. But that is the big picture. In past decades and centuries one destroyed area wasn't so critical, because there were still hundreds, even thousands of unaffected acres, But now we've built out onto every available inch, and then some, especially along the coast, and we haven't left Mother Nature much recovery room. In fact, we build back stronger, deeper, higher. I am one of the guilty parties, living on what once was a barrier island, where I have no business being there at all. Yet I don't want to leave, and plenty more still want to move here.

(I'm  having computer problems, so can't include photos or sketches. I hope to solve this issue soon).

  

What Happened

 Months after Hurricane Ian's storm surge covered it with a couple of feet of brackish/salt water, slimy gray silt, and no doubt sewage and other pollutants, my Florida backyard is still there, but it's not a place you'd like to visit. 

Other than shoveling debris out of the way of the doors, cleaning up in the yard had to wait for the more urgent job of removing sodden carpet, books, sheetrock, furniture, and ruined appliances. I'd still be standing in the middle of a mess were it not for family and neighbors who did yeoman's service. 

 With no air conditioning, the black mold didn't wait to make its appearance. I lost most of my sketchbooks, journals and nature studies. Piling them up on the side of the road for the claw trucks to remove hurt. Perhaps they could have been salvaged, but there was no time for that. 

It was clear that I either was going to spend a good part of my remaining years trying to reclaim what was lost, or start living anew. I chose the latter, but it's not easy. The past keeps tugging at you, especially as memory fails and there are no photos or diaries to jog it.

Temporarily homeless and carless, we lived first with one sister, and then another, a good hour-and-one-half commute over I-75. There were no rentals or sales of either cars or apartments. Eventually we found a car, and then bought a small condo - a little over 800 square feet plus a reasonable screened patio. This space has become more and more like home, but I want to  move back into the house if and when it is habitable.

A host of problems starting roughly around 2020, and steadily worsening, already had interfered both with my engagement with the natural world, and consequently, my blogging. The frequency of my blog posts diminished from slow to a trickle. I lost the rejuvenation that regular interaction with nature can bring, along with the physical benefits of active gardening. I was doing very little, yet was always pressed for time, and bad went to worse. 

Then Ian hit, and that was that. I have been consciencious about packing and evacuating since we've lived here, and we've been hit by 2 major storms - Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017. Irma should have been a wakeup call, because several homes on our street flooded, and the debris line left by the surge came disturbingly close to our back door. But then Ian didn't seem to be headed our way initially, and already feeling half-defeated I did nothing to prepare, and we made the potentially fatal mistake of riding it out. 

Fortunately, a neighbor with a two-story house took us in, so we didn't get wet. Had we stayed, our lives wouldn't have been threatened because the water didn't rise high enough to drown us, but it would have been an extremely ugly experience, and in other worse-hit areas people who stayed died or had very close calls. As it was, looking at the rising water from the safety of a 2nd floor window was bad enough.

Streets and canals disappeared. All was just a gray sea, with the houses and vehicles poking up from it. Yet compared with the destruction experienced by Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel and Matlacha, we got off easy.

As for the yard, the native shrubs and small trees scarcely missed a beat, since we got very little wind, but the herbacious material was all killed to the ground. The bromeliads won't come back, because they have no underground parts or seed banks to regenerate. We didn't even get that much rain with Ian, and this winter has been exceptionally dry, with no flushing rains at all, so some plants, the bougainvilleas for instance, have had a hard time recovering. 

Other than removing debris like a stray recycling bin, various bottles of toxic cleaning solutions and fuel additives, a 5-gallon gas can with a mixture of gas and water, and even most of a pizza, I've done little with the yard. An initial cleanup was followed by a regrowth of weeds, and now the front is also littered with construction debris. At least the drought means that the weeds are not as robust as they will be in a few months, assuming seasonal rains resume. 

Even with all the work of rebuilding and living out of boxes, I've had time to sketch, but not the will. Now and again I get a little burst of energy, and scribble a little in my sketchbook. Sometimes I've tried to force it, with predictable ininspired results. 

I sit with the window open tonight, listening to the chuck-will's-widow calling from the mangroves. Even though we live in a large complex, there are glimpses of the natural world to be had. Alligators swim in the small bay outside, and the oak and mahogany trees lining the streets host a wealth of native tillandsias. Resurrection fern flourishes in the hedges, and I've even seen a good-sized black racer. The winter warblers have gone back north. The swallow-tailed kites, coming from South America, delighted us with their aeronautical skills. These magnificent birds epitomize grace, strength and beauty. Now they have headed back too. We don't see many, but throughout the day and early evening we see wading birds, anhingas, frigatebirds, ospreys and both black and turkey vultures. 

The bird's song in the stillness of the night is comforting. Here in Florida we have done, and continue to do our best to wipe out the natural ecosystem. But pockets still resist, and in spots even thrive. We haven't destroyed everything yet. And maybe I will take out my sketchbook tomorrow.