Green Hills of Captiva

"....then up and down through orchard-bushed hills, around a slope of forest to the top of the rift wall where we could look down and see the plain, the heavy forget below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine of Lake Mantra rose-colored at one end with a half million tiny dots that were flamingoes." Hemingway, from Green Hills of Africa






The parking lot of Ding Darling National Refuge was under construction so we parked two miles out in the tram service lot and waited for the shuttle bus which was to run all day continuously.  Behind us by a quarter mile was Bowman Beach, a vast public visiting area that we had biked to in a previous visit, and just one small part of the network of accessible beaches, canals, and straits that line the Sanibel Captiva Island.  We were on our way to Ding Darling, a great mangrove barrier island habitat that had been purchased then preserved by the late great Ding Darling, a Iowa cartoonist and newspaper publisher who had visited these waters back in the 30's and realized that

this was a sportsman's mecca – used as a landing pad for hundreds of species of birds, some of the great tarpon and sea trout waters in the world, and a few salt-water alligators.  Men of those times did not see the benefit of limits on harvesting the wildlife, nor did they see the disadvantages of prospecting old growth mangrove for golf courses and resorts. Ding acutely understood the beauty of

limits and the need for preservation and eventually became one of the most powerful conservationist of his time. The nature preserve, now visited by millions, is a fairly pristine habitat, virtually impassable by man except through narrow trails that can be kayaked and very shallow bays that don't lend themselves to heavy boating.  Once we got to the recreation center, we got onto our kayaks and slipped into the calm shoreline water where we had just watched a pelican jump down from his roost on a dock pylon to viciously gobble a unwary silver fish. Our guide quickly spoke of the manatees, or sea cows, a kind of non descript aqua mammal that are seen all over the islands as they rise their

snouts up onto the surface for air and, as they dip back down into the shallows, leave a smooth crest on the surface, their marking.  We bunched at the first stop and behind a manatee rose as if from nowhere, as a pelican swung around the corner of the mangrove and silently opened its fish net beak and we all awed.  The rest of the tour moved in a similar pattern: we paddled for fifteen minutes, stopped at the next trail sign, and as the naturalist spoke of the wildlife, they would show. Ospreys circled overhead, their peculiar talons as often as not carrying a fish; an Anhinga standing silent as a stark shadow in the grasp of a mangrove bank; Double-crested Cormorant, Heron, and so on.  Look out for the tree crabs, they might fall in your kayak, but don't worry, they are strictly vegetarian! To paddle through the dense shoots and tangled vines of the mangrove is to see immediately the difficulty of living here unless you happen to be a mullet or shrimp, and that, we hoped, -- as Ding Darling must have seen -- is just the way it would stay for a long future.