Seasonal
Wildlife here is a function of water level, not luck. When the marsh dries down, the animals gather where the water is left.
Everglades National Park has a dry season from roughly November through April and a wet season from June through October, and the difference for a visitor is enormous.
As water levels fall, alligators, turtles, wading birds and fish concentrate into the remaining sloughs and gator holes. Roseate spoonbills, wood storks, ibis and several heron species pack around shrinking water, which makes January through March the strongest birdwatching stretch of the year. Mosquitoes ease off. Daytime temperatures sit in the seventies rather than the nineties.
In the wet season the water spreads across the whole marsh and so do the animals. The park is still open and still extraordinary, but the sightings drop, the humidity is punishing and the mosquitoes at Flamingo in August are a serious deterrent.
The park's three entrances do not connect to each other. Shark Valley on the Tamiami Trail is about an hour from downtown Miami. The Ernest F. Coe entrance at Homestead, which leads to the Anhinga Trail and the road to Flamingo, is an hour to ninety minutes. The Gulf Coast entrance at Everglades City is around two and a half hours.
One entrance fee per vehicle, currently in the mid-thirties of dollars, covers seven days at all of them. Fees change; check before travelling.
Shark Valley's narrated tram tours take reservations, and from December through March the morning departures fill well ahead.
Airboats are excluded from the great majority of the national park. Three long-established operators on the Tamiami Trail were grandfathered in when the East Everglades Expansion Area joined the park in 1989 and hold Park Service concessions there. Every other airboat sold from Miami launches outside the boundary, on tribal land or in the water conservation areas.
They are good outings. They are not, for the most part, a visit to the national park.
SourcingSeasonal wildlife guidance, entrance structure, fee basis and airboat concession policy summarised from National Park Service material for Everglades National Park. Entrance fees and tram schedules are set by the park and its concessioner and change; confirm on nps.gov before travelling.
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Newsroom
Seasonal
One of the few fisheries where the animal is returned alive. The season is fixed, the supply is not, and opening week is the worst value of the year.
Who reported this
Outdoors & Water Editor
Andre covers the bay, the reef and the two national parks most visitors never realise are an hour away. He worked on charter boats out of Biscayne before he wrote about them, he can tell you which airboat trips are inside a park boundary and which are not, and he checks the marine forecast before he checks anything else.
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