The Everglades Are Best From November, When the Water Drops

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.

Why dry is better

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.

Practical notes for the season

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.

The airboat point, again

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.