Corkscrew's Old Cypress

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, northeast of Naples, protects the largest remaining old-growth bald cypress forest in North America. Some of its trees are about 500 years old and stand more than 100 feet tall, survivors of a logging boom that cut nearly every other virgin cypress stand in Florida in the middle of the twentieth century. A boardwalk a little over two miles long carries visitors through the forest above the swamp water. Conservationists bought the first of the land in 1954, racing the loggers, and the National Audubon Society has run the sanctuary ever since. Audubon's involvement in the swamp went back decades: its wardens had guarded the wading bird colonies there from plume hunters, who shot egrets for the feathers on fashionable hats in the early 1900s. The sanctuary was long home to the largest nesting colony of wood storks in the United States. The storks feed by touch, sweeping their bills through shallow water, and they need water levels to fall at the right pace to concentrate fish. As drainage and development changed the region's water, the colony has failed to nest in many recent years. In 2007 a large ghost orchid was found high on a cypress trunk visible from the boardwalk, and in most summers since, its blooms have drawn crowds with binoculars and long lenses.