The scenario plays out on any beach.  It’s instinctive and universal.  Walk along any beach just along the waterline where the waves roll rhythmically in and you’ll catch yourself doing it:  looking down.  Suddenly, right there, tumbling in sand and foam, you see it!  A fleeting hint of color, a minute rippled edge.  As the water recedes pulling a layer of sand and shell with it, it disappears.  Now you see it, now you don’t!  With impressive reaction time you reach down and grab the illusion.  Slowly you open a dripping handful of sand and peer inside, hoping for the perfect keeper – an intact shell, a wonder nature, strikingly beautiful, elegantly scrolled, perfectly fluted, delicately patterned.

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Way back in April, when I posted “The Real Florida for Kids – Eco-discovery in Lowry Park Zoo,” I promised two more posts featuring special places in Florida where kids can truly experience Florida’s unique natural habitat. Well, it’s taken this long to get to part two: “The Mysterious Everglades.”

Imagine this. A river of grass: a slow-moving sheet of water spanning thousands of acres, sometimes seen, sometimes not, covered by golden sawgrass as far as the eye can see, and broken up only by hammock islands where cabbage palm, royal palm, live oak, gumbo limbo and West Indian mahogany thrive. There is a silence here. It’s a place of forbidding bogs, cypress knees protruding from dark water, spidery airplants clinging to tree limbs, life-sustaining mangroves, showy bromiliads, bright green fern, and the elusive ghost orchid.

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