The Florida Ditches
by THOMAS BARBOUR
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No STATE in the Union has been more widely ditched than Florida, and no state has suffered more in the process or been more extensively — albeit fortuitously — beautified. Years ago I planned to write a book on the ditches of Florida. Please don’t laugh, because they really are a good subject for serious study.
The ditches fall into two categories: those made for drainage purposes, and those made in connection with road building. Florida is flat or gently rolling; hence the way to make a road is to dig along both sides of the right of way, pile the spoil in the middle, and flatten this down for a roadbed. Because the material dug out to make them has been completely disposed of, roadside ditches are relatively permanent.
Drainage ditches, some of which are enormous canals, are not permanent. The spoil is piled up on the sides, and sooner or later the torrential rains of spring and summer wash the banks back into the ditch. Years ago, when it became the fashion to dig these drainage ditches, all sort s of benefits were recklessly promised, including millions of acres of land which were going to be opened to agriculture. What really happened was that the size of Lake Okeechobee was greatly reduced and the warm waters were drained from the Everglades. Since these waters were a God-given aid in warming the air when cold northwest winds swept down, the climate of Southeastern Florida changed for the worse. Now extensive dams have been installed in the Okeechobee region to prevent the great ditches from carrying off the water too fast.
It must be admitted that the drop in the level of Lake Okeechobee produced a large area of fine truck land. What in the old days was called the Custard Apple Ridge, around the lake, was perhaps the richest agricultural land in Florida. It is true that this zone has been greatly extended by lowering the lake level, but fire has played havoc with the dried muck. After a few dozen severe burnings, the Everglades have become hopeless waste from an agricultural point of view. John Small records deep, rich muck, all vegetable humus, burned down to a clean white sand in a fire which smoldered for months on end.
The deep drainage ditches received a concentration of fresh-water fish, and in the early days I used to troll regularly in the one which ran from Lake Okeechobee to West Palm Beach. The lateral canals, called the range-line canals, swarmed with alligators and turtles and big-mouthed bass. Many of these canals are now choked with “ bonnets” (yellow cow lilies). The canals have been fished out, the gators killed off, and enough sand has washed in from the banks so that there is not much water in them, except after very heavy rains.
The giant shallow basin in which the Everglades lie slopes gently to the south, and when the Tamiami Trail was laid out, deep ditches had to be dug to provide material for a road high enough to be out of water during the downpour which comes with occasional hurricanes. This road would be a dam across the entire region, were it not for the innumerable culverts and bridges along its length. The aquatic life of the whole Everglades section, apart from a few depressed areas where water has persisted except in periods of great drought, has been gradually concentrated in the ditches along the Trail.
I intended to write my book about these roadside ditches, which border hundreds, indeed thousands, of miles of highway in Florida, and present an extremely interesting field of investigation for the naturalist. After the ditches were dug, an enormous variety of animals and plants seized on this manmade environment and took it for their own.
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LET me show you a few samples. Suppose we are driving from Gainesville to the Thomas farm where our fossil dig is situated. Not. very many miles west of the town the road cuts through a cypress swamp. The cypress was not good enough for timber, so fortunately it still stands. Bearded with moss, it is also covered with delicate pale green when its needles shoot forth in the spring. Innumerable wild flowers carpet the dry stretches among the trees, but most of the cypresses stand in shallow water, which is of course deeper along the side of the road where the roadside ditch runs.
This ditch is filled with Utricularia, that interesting little aquatic carnivorous plant that catches tiny fishes with its tendrils. Its blossoms shoot up about four inches into the air. Each one of these tiny flowers is a yellow ball, like the individual flowers of an acacia, and these little heads come up so thick that the effect is one of a mat of fine gold.
I remember one occasion when my wife and I were driving across Paine’s Prairie, again not far from Gainesville, in early July. This prairie is the result of the underground seepage of a very large lake. In limestone country such as we are discussing, it is not unusual for a “plug” to fall out of the bottom of a lake, which will then disappear. Paine’s Prairie tends to become a lake again from time to time but is discouraged by cattle owners, who find the grazing so excellent that they keep the outlet open with dynamite. The cattle graze mostly while wading, for the area is never wholly dry. White egrets, and ducks, and birds too numerous to catalogue make Paine’s Prairie an ornithological paradise. The causeway is some twenty feet above the prairie level, to thwart the prairie should it seriously and suddenly decide to become a lake again and get the jump on human efforts. This means, perforce, that the roadside ditch through the prairie is deep.
On the occasion to which I refer, when we were motoring southward, we came down the hill leading to the prairie causeway from the north. Stretched out before us was a scene difficult to describe, for the ditch had grown up and become completely filled with water hyacinths. It seemed that every single one of them was in bloom. They looked as if a great mauve carpet, about sixty feet wide and three to four miles long, had been stretched along beside the road. Rosamond said instantly, “That beats any flower show in Japan, and yet we have never heard of it before.” This was ditch beauty on a lavish scale. It is not always thus.
I should like to take you to a puny little ditch not far eastward from Eau Gallie, on the road towards the St. Johns River marsh. This passes near a dairy, and the cattle come to drink and tread down its sides. The region through which it runs is completely denuded of what was once a glorious stand of long-leaf pine. It is now a dreary waste.
But stop and look at those white flowers. They are a pigmy water lily perfect in every detail, just like the great white pond lilies which you may see by thousands in the roadside ditch where the road west from Melbourne crosses the St. Johns marsh. These little lilies are fairy blooms scarce the size of a half dollar and with the most delicate floating leaves. I had never seen them anywhere else, and being no botanist I once took my botanist friends, Archie and Margie Carr, from the University of Florida, to look at them. They, too, had never seen the pigmy lilies elsewhere. I have gone to see these blossoms year after year with great enjoyment.
I must not leave this subject of the roadside ditches without pointing out that they are of real interest to zoologists as well as botanists. Horton Hobbs has made a detailed study of the crayfishes of Florida and incidentally raised the number of named forms known in the state to forty-two from the ten that had been reported before he began his studies. Of these forty-two, no fewer than nineteen are frequently found in the ditches.
An interesting amphibian, the so-called Congo eel, — which is no eel at all, but a gigantic salamanderlike creature with short stubby legs, — has invaded the ditches to such an extent that Archie Carr believes 90 per cent of the total population of this animal has migrated to this environment. The same thing has happened with the tiny Cyprinodont fish, one of the group of little fishes in which the eggs hatch within the body of the female and the young are born alive. It is called Leptolucania omnata.
I shall not attempt to list the many species of frogs, snakes, and turtles which the naturalist may find, but many times I have driven along the roads of Florida after a heavy rain in the spring and listened to a bewildering chorus of amphibian voices. One drives along over a high sandy ridge, the ditch is dry, and there is silence. One dips a few feet to a swale and the voices rise in frantic crescendo, so that it is quite impossible to speak to the person beside you in the car.
Years ago, George Nelson, the chief preparator of our museum, found that the ditches near his winter home at Sebastian were prolific collecting grounds for most attractive little aquarium fish. His room was gay with tanks swarming with dainty fishes, such as the pigmy perch, Heterandria (one of the tiniest vertebrates in the world), mollienisias, gambusias, and several other lovely species of Funduius.
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OF COURSE, those ditches running beside long stretches of road through uninhabited country, where few cars pass, are usually the most interesting. I once saw a pair of otters playing in a ditch, and they seemed to me to be nearer to the embodiment of pure joy than any other creatures I ever saw. Smooth and sleek and brown, they rolled about looking like a pair of animated rubber animals. One often sees gators. I saw a six-footer once that was obviously planning a meal of pork, for he was watching a brood of merry lit t le pigs busily rooting near the roadside. The edge of the ditch is a favorite nuzzling ground for hogs over a large part of Florida and Georgia, where there are no fence laws.
Then there are the birds. With protection, the snowy egrets, commonly known in Florida as the “short whites,” are now, I think, the most abundant ditch-side bird in the state. In my youth you could spend a day on the most perfect feeding grounds and not see one. They may not be very much more abundant than their allies, the “long whites,” but they are more often seen near at hand, since the “long whites” prefer larger bodies of water to feed in, and are more shy.
Going out to sec the birds on the Tamiami Trail was long one of the great tourist activities of the state — that is, for those who did not come here for gambling or horse racing alone. The deep ditch on the north side of the trail is still teeming with fish, and it drains such an enormous area that after heavy rains there are large spaces which are low enough for the water to back up and stand, and where as yet the fires of the dry winters have not destroyed all humus soil and all animal life. When conditions are just right the concentrations of herons, ibis, and flint heads, as our only native stork is called here in Florida, make one of the loveliest scenes that can be imagined. Thanks to the excellent work of the wardens employed by the Audubon Society, these birds have increased to a point where it is to be questioned whether the area will support a much larger population.
You will see many birds besides waders along the Trail. There will be ducks and coots and gallinules as well as the handsome boat-tail grackles —“jackdaws,” we call them down here. In spring these display the metallic greens and blues of their plumage with much bowing to their ladyloves and blowing up and fluffing of the feathers on their throats as they pour forth their loud and cheerful, if somewhat raucous, songs.
If you ever drive over this interesting road, don’t fail to stop about sixty miles after you leave Miami, where there arc a number of bridges a little wider than average. These are the places where the Trail crosses the extreme upper waters of Turner River, Lostman River, and the other streams which flow down and empty into the Bay of Ten Thousand Islands. Here the Indians still have waterways on which they can travel with their dugouts; and to look down these channels under the overarching trees is to be granted a glimpse of fairyland. Look down in the water, too, for the best ready-made fresh-water aquariums that you will ever see. The water is crystal-clear and the gars, grin dies, breams, and bass swarm in countless numbers.
If you are sharp-eyed and fortunate in finding the orchids in bloom, you may well see the white starlike flower of that curious leafless plant, Polyrrhiza. in this strange orchid the chlorophyl which takes care of its nutritional needs is concentrated in the long spidery roots which stick fast to the bark of one of the trees hanging over the water, its usual preference being for the pond apple. I know of but one place where this superb orchid is really abundant, and that is in the royal palm hammock over in Collier County. The full name of this orchid is Polyrrhiza Lindeni, and the single flower which it bears is the largest borne by any species native of North America.
Archie Carr recalls several ditch streams, not far from the royal palms, where the waterway passes through dense thickets, so that no direct sunlight penetrates its borders and one may wade about waist-deep in a natural hothouse. In the summer, he declares, the blooms of the leafless orchids sometimes make a fragrance which is so heavy that it is nauseating. In one place, he saw half a dozen species of orchids in bloom at the same time.
On the western end of the ditch of which I have been writing, there are natural waterways leading down to salt water which is quite deep at high tide. At times many salt-water fish run inland, so that after the great freeze of 1934 hundreds upon hundreds of giant tarpon were killed in the ditch by the cold, to the great enjoyment of the buzzards and black vultures — but of no one else, even if the wind favored him.
After heavy rains the tributary run-off rivulets from the usually dry marsh along the Tamiami Canal swell to little torrents, and the run-off from the Glades makes innumerable rills, each of which has built a miniature delta. On these high-water days it is extremely amusing to watch the strife botween the soft-shelled turtles and the gars. They lie in wait, frequently in most surprising numbers, for bits of desirable flotsam which may be carried down by the flood, and the competition is violent as they snap and tear furiously at any bit of food which may appear, until it is rent in pieces and swallowed. I remember one year when a cloudburst followed a fierce grass fire, and the carcasses of many very ripe rabbits and coons came floating down, to the immense delectation of the waiting throng of fish and reptiles.
There is not much difference between high tide and low tide around the southwest coast of Florida, but at full moon, especially if there are heavy southwest winds at the same time, lots of salt water gets into the ditch and there is good fly fishing for snook right from the bank of the highway. It is a curious fact that these fish, which when taken at sea are among the best and most delicious there are, soon grow quite inedible in fresh or slightly brackish water. After a few days in the Canal, their flesh becomes soft and tastes most disagreeably of mud.
Roadside ditches, of course, are filled with water only after heavy rain, unless the road passes through one of the myriad shallow ponds or marshes scattered over Florida. They abound in the vast areas of the state which the casual observer from the North never sees. I can only beg or advise the nature-loving visitor to keep off U. S. Route No. 1 as far as possible, and zigzag back and forth across the state over the roads which the map shows to pass through the smallest number of villages and towns. Drive slowly and keep your eyes open. If you do this, you will agree with me that in these ditches a potential eyesore has been transmuted into a scene of constantly varying interest.