To save Everglades, guardians fight time - and climate

Ian Bartoszek, right, and Ian Easterling carry a 14-foot, 95-pound, female Burmese python out of an upland habitat in Naples, Fla. A male python fitted with a radio transmitter implant led them to the female a couple yards from an upscale housing development.

A yellow faced budgie, rests in a tree at the Wild Turkey Preserve Strand near Fort Myers, Fla. The non-native bird is one several species now living in the wild after being released by pet owners.

A green heron hunts for small fish. Formed roughly 5,000 years ago, during a time of sea level rise, the Everglades once comprised an area twice the size of New Jersey.

The first rays of sunlight color clouds over Everglades National Park, near Flamingo, Fla. The park receives nearly 60 inches of rain annually. “Here are no lofty peaks seeking the sky, no mighty glaciers or rushing streams wearing away the uplifted land,” President Harry S. Truman said in a Dec. 6, 1947, address dedicating the Everglades National Park. “Here is land, tranquil in its quiet beauty, serving not as the source of water, but as the last receiver of it. To its natural abundance we owe the spectacular plant and animal life that distinguishes this place from all others in our country."

A great egret takes flight at Lake Okeechobee in Clewiston, Fla. Over the course of just the last century, about half of the Everglades’ original footprint has been lost — plowed under or paved over, never to be recovered, so long as South Florida’s 8 million human inhabitants claim it for their homes, livelihoods and recreation.

Feral pigs roam near LaBelle, Fla. The state is second only to Texas in the number of non-native wild pigs living in the state. The glades have been sapped by canals and dams that remapped the landscape and altered animal habitats, polluted by upstream agricultural areas, transformed by invasive species. And now, rising sea levels — this time, caused by man — threaten to undo what it took nature millennia to build.

Tiffany Troxler, research scientist and professor at Florida International University walks on a boardwalk at a wetlands research site at Everglades National Park near Flamingo, Fla. She's studying wetlands ecosystem and its relation to sea-level rise.

A great egret is seen on top of a tree at dawn. What survives is not so much a natural ecosystem, but a remnant, heavily dependent on — and at the mercy of — a network of more than 2,100 miles of canals, 2,000 miles of levees and hundreds of floodgates, pump stations and other water-control structures.

A housing development built in Everglades wetlands is seen from the air near Naples, Florida.

An endangered snail kite flies with an apple snail at Lake Kissimmee in Kenansville, Fla. Water level control and the resulting loss of wetlands has caused the population to drop to about 400 breeding pairs.

A subsidence post marks more than 6 feet of peat soil loss since the post was driven into the ground in 1924 at the University of Florida Everglades Research Center, in Belle Glade, Fla. The amount of peat lost has had ongoing implications for restoration and habitat recovery for the Everglades.

A barred owl rests at dawn. What the Army Corps of Engineers calls a “highly managed system,” others have sardonically labeled a “Disney Everglades.” Nearly two decades and $4 billion into the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, an ambitious federal-state program adopted in 2000, new data about the pace of climate change have called into question how much of the Everglades can ever be salvaged — and what that even means.

In this Friday, Oct. 18, 2019 photo, a Florida red-bellied turtle moves in to eat the flower of a lily pad in Everglades National Park, near Flamingo, Fla.

A baby alligator rests atop an adult in a swamp at the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.

A 14-foot, 95-pound, female Burmese python is held tightly by wildlife biologist Ian Bartoszek after he captured it in Naples, Fla. The snake was in the process of shedding a layer of skin, making handling the creature especially challenging.

An alligator prowls the waters in the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. Formed roughly 5,000 years ago, ironically enough, during a time of sea-level rise, the glades once comprised an area twice the size of New Jersey.