GREEN TREEFROG
one-third life size

SQUIRREL TREEFROG
color variation

Beyond the pinelands the road, having descended some 2 feet from the park entrance, brings you into the true everglades—the river of grass, or, as the Seminoles call it, Pa-Hay-Okee (grassy waters). To the eye, the glades look like a very flat, grassy prairie broken by scattered clumps of trees. During the dry season (winter) it is in fact a prairie—and sometimes burns fiercely. The dominant everglades plant is sawgrass (actually not a grass but a sedge). The tree islands develop in both high and low spots of the glades terrain. In this unbelievably flat country, small differences in elevation—measured in inches rather than feet—cause major differences in the plantlife: tropical hardwoods on the “mesas,” and swamp trees in the potholes.

A spot in the glades where the limestone base is elevated just 2 feet will be occupied by a small forest of tropical hardwoods and palms—a 14 “hammock” much like those of the pinelands. A low spot—just a few inches below the general level of the limestone base—will remain wet even in the relatively rainless winter when the sawgrass becomes tinder dry. This sloughlike depression will support a stand of baldcypress, called a “cypress head.” Other tree islands, called bayheads and willow heads, develop in many places where soil and peat accumulate.

Step from the sawgrass glades i