This continues from my last blog post on my first day in Okefenokee NWR.
After a restful night, I paddled back through much of the same area I’d already paddled. Back to the Suwannee Canal, across the canal and down another side trail. I passed lots of tiny frogs that almost seemed to hop across water, but I wasn’t able to be sure. Certainly they were easily supported by lily pads.
This time my campsite was a floating platform that I pulled my canoe onto and hung a hammock from the wooden shelter roof.
This was still an easy day of paddling and I realized how much water one could cover with a long day of hard canoeing on such calm waters. Most of my canoe experience was lost in the past, before I moved to Tucson, a desert place so dry the ‘rivers’ are almost always dry washes.
This night again I was lucky enough to see a baby alligator swimming, even closer to my campsite, which was more exposed to open water than my previous camp. I was also visited on the sleeping platform by a tree frog. I was driven into the insect net of my hammock early that night, there being a much greater abundance of mosquitoes at this campsite.
That night I heard a familiar trilling noise, something that reminded me of an animal I’d heard in Nebraska, which seemed a world away. I’d heard it the night before. I was pretty sure I knew what the noise was but I couldn’t be completely certain until I saw Sandhill cranes the next morning as I canoed towards the entrance of Okefenokee on my last day at that particular swamp. It was a happy way for me to end my Okefenokee trip and begin on the rest of my road trip to Southern Florida. My next stop was Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, where the last report of a Carolina Parakeet was made.
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