by Tim Homan
If you launch at the convergence of three conditions—sunny sky, low water, no recent heavy rain to dilute color—you will quickly discover you are even luckier. Under those conditions, the upper Suwannee’s water creates another realm, another layer of beauty as thin as the river’s surface tension, as deep as the top of the blue sky below you. On those lucky days the flawless sheen of the upper Suwannee captures and keeps reflections. On those days the river gleams shiny and black, its surface a magical and slow-moving obsidian mirror.
The river ran low and dark and silent, no substantial rain for weeks according to the outfitter. Blackwater witchery was at work. When Page and I stopped paddling, our red canoe floated on an exact replica of a red canoe reflected in reverse—keel up, bow down—floating on the inverted perfection of forested sky. We sat at the hinge of two heavens, the downward one white with clouds near its blue bottom, the illusion of depth and a second dimension on a single plane. Buttressed tree trunks tapered to slender boles reaching far below into that blue-heaven home of fish; white clouds slowly coasted beneath the topmost branches; sweeping strands of Spanish moss (1) waved in the light wind below our boats where there was no breeze. The undersides of dragonflies hovered above the bellies of those deep-water clouds.
Some of the bald cypresses (2) were still feathery green; others had already turned an autumnal russet. Their sharply flaring conical buttresses quickly slanted into the shapes of fluted, upside-down funnels. Single-cypress islands held fast and defiant as forts at midstream, providing evidence of severe and prolonged drought in the past.
The low water let us look upon strange sights. Forest-made picket fences stretched tight between the pillars of two neighboring cypresses. These fences were constructed of sturdy interconnected knees—bony and primeval looking—and the modified, wood-railing roots leading from knee post to knee post. All of these barricades, rails and posts, now hung suspended above the low-water banks of the river.
Short squat tupelos often bordered the river banks early on, their pot-bellied buttresses frequently bulging into bizarre shapes: botanical hoodoos. Below the buttresses, wide-spreading skirts of interwoven roots snaked out in all directions. For much of the year, these roots hold hands with their neighbors beneath the blackwater blanket, a weave of root wrapped around root.
Our bird count was still low when we paddled into Florida early on the second day. The birding by ear and binocs would remain below average for the rest of the trip, especially for waders and waterfowl. Unlike Florida’s spring-run rivers further south, the upper Suwannee’s sand bottom and wildly fluctuating water levels prevent the growth of abundant aquatic vegetation. Our wader count was still stuck at one White Ibis, one Green Heron, and occasional Great Blue Herons at trip’s end. Wood Ducks were common and squealed (3) away from our approach in increasingly larger groups as we worked our way downstream. A single Pied-billed Grebe, a couple of American Coots, and a half dozen Double-crested Cormorants filled out our tally of waterbirds.
Day five dawned to a low and unbroken ceiling of dark clouds to every horizon, a drenching rain drifting our way. Brown showed us the incoming colors—green, yellow, a little red—on his iPhone. The November morning was warm enough that we didn’t have to worry about becoming overly chilled, especially the kayakers who paddled dry under their skirts. The mild and intermittent showers were not as steady and intense as the widespread colors suggested. Limestone bluffs rose steadily higher over the day’s distance, their faces heavily pitted and scalloped by the long sculpting of the acidic, tannin-stained water.
Mid-morning, we gawked as a slender doe swam the width of the now much wider Suwannee. She quickly climbed the steep bank and ran away from our colorful flotilla. Immediately after the doe disappeared, Page and I saw a rut-randy buck, a smallish six-pointer, hit the brakes at the top of the bluff. He spooked and trotted downstream, closely paralleling the river from the bluff’s rim.
Our group arrived at Woods Ferry, the Suwannee’s first river camp downstream from Georgia, a little earlier than expected. We hauled all our gear—much of it piled in a high-sided wagon and a Walmart shopping cart—up the long and sharply switchbacking boardwalk to our reserved cabins: sides completely screened, light, fan, electricity, hot showers in the bathhouse.
We gathered for supper in the spacious camp pavilion, six picnic tables and three combination light and ceiling fans, at five-thirty and dusk. After supper, the evening still early but dark, a small songbird fluttered in out of the light rain and slowly flew a few erratic loops around the inside edge of the well-lit shelter, circling right over our heads as we sat at the picnic table. Brown identified the blurry bird as a Black-and-white Warbler (4). After three or four laps the small passerine flew out into the drizzling rain and landed in a clump of low shrubs. We walked up fairly close and confirmed that it was indeed a Black-and-white Warbler. Brown further ID’ed the wild warbler as the more boldly black-streaked male.
Before we returned to our desserts and after-dinner drinks, the songbird re-entered the shelter and began flying flattened loops again, this time with a little more speed and confidence. The wood warbler landed and rested for half a minute on the empty and darker outside seat of our picnic table before winging up to and landing on a ceiling-fan blade. The bird just stood there, slowly looking around, a bit confused and dazed from our perspective. Maybe he was a worn-out migrant looking for a warmer and drier place to roost.
After a short stint of standing on the fan, the passerine began pecking at the top side of the blade and gobbling down bug carrion by the beakful. His motions became more animated, more fluid and forceful. He flitted to other blades on the same fan, foraged, then darted up to the nearly level top of the motor housing and gulped down more dead insects and spiders.
About twenty minutes after he had first flown into the shelter, the seventh diner scouted around for a couple of more laps before landing right on the crown of Linda’s head. We were all amazed, especially Linda, who was standing hatless and freshly showered near the outside edge of the pavilion. We thought the small songbird would fly off as soon as he recognized his mistake. But the wood warbler just stood there making himself right at home in the warm and hairy haven of Linda’s wavy black tresses. Linda strained to stay still; she was clearly the more nervous of the two.
We circled Linda and clicked close-up photos like she was a famous movie star, and we were pain-in-the-ass paparazzi. The 5-inch-long fluff of feathers wasn’t fazed by our near approach at eye level. None of us, especially Linda, had ever been this close to a wild wood warbler. The bird’s black-and-white tuxedo colors contrasted and complemented one another, a simple but effective elegance.
The mature male remained perched in its original position on her noggin, nonchalantly turning his head from time to time. Finally, after what felt like five minutes but was probably only two, Linda’s top-most ornament—more winged angel than stationary star—flapped back to his fan-blade perch. Later, she told us the bird’s tiny feet had tickled her scalp.
After resting in Linda’s ready-made nest, the seventh diner began a search pattern that lasted the remainder of the night. The Black-and-white Warbler alternated between two feeding strategies: pecking at the fan blades and the tops of the motor housings for dead insects and looking about for small flying insects or moths that had landed on the pavilion’s light-colored ceiling. When the famished passerine locked in on an airborne mosquito, he made a short fluttering flight out from and back to his sally-perch fan blade. Brown made a slow-motion video of the wood warbler’s flight and beak-snap snatch of a mosquito out of the air. You could actually see the mosquito a moment before it made the metabolic journey toward flight fuel.
The seventh diner followed his hunger from one fan blade to the next and from one fan to the next in repeated rhythm. Usually the warbler would flit to every blade—pecking for the dead, sallying out for the living—on a fan before moving to the next fan to repeat the process. Sometimes he would forage at all three fans in a row, then repeat the pattern in the opposite direction—back and forth, back and forth across the pavilion.
The warbler paid little or no attention to us and our movements. His mind and eyes remained laser-focused on finding food. When the songbird searched the surrounding airspace for flying insects, he did so with noticeable intensity, with short rapid-fire movements of his head. We walked up to a fan and focused our cameras a little over an arm’s length away. He kept scarfing up mostly six-legged sustenance without a sideways glance.
The bicolored bird’s fearlessness gave us more evidence he had just finished or was still migrating. Early on, the wood warbler had reached an instinctive decision that his need for shelter and food were far greater than his fear of head-hairy humans sitting around a pavilion picnic table. The seventh diner’s decision was a kind of clear-headed genius that played the best odds for survival. After all, our short tenancy in North America and our very low predation rates upon warbler-sized birds made it very likely that we were not included in their imprinted predator patterns. And, most likely, his most important and immediate concerns were an empty stomach and drained fat reserves.
The forest jewel’s quest for food—more energy, more miles in the tank—had pared his personal space to some minimum distance. To our credit, we never tested that minimum, never gave him reason to quit his feast. We may have overdone the photography a bit, but … he was such a beautiful and compelling wild creature, and he had landed on Linda’s head. The Black-and-white Warbler had flown right into the wheelhouse of our nervous system’s need for novelty, and we had responded by taking photos: the mildest form of acquisitive possession, the kindest form of counting coup, a major step in our cultural evolution.
We left the pavilion at nearly nine and left the lights on to attract insect fodder for his feeding spree. Awakened by a nagging bladder, I walked to the bathroom at around two-thirty. The lights were still on and the seventh diner was still charging out from his fan-blade perches, eagerly gorging on mosquitos and small moths snapped out of the air with his long, stiletto-thin bill. The bloated little bird finally flew away in the crepuscular light of early morning, around seven, when Brown and I were setting up our stoves to start breakfast. All available evidence indicated that this passerine, which may have weighed ten grams or less before entering the pavilion, had been binging on insects and spiders for twelve and a half hours, more proof he had been a desperately hungry migrant.
The rest of the group left the river camp at nine that morning. Page and I were scheduled to stay another night at Woods Ferry before continuing our canoe trip down to the river camp at Dowling Park. We turned on the pavilion lights at dusk and checked regularly for avian occupants. No mature male Black-and-white Warbler, no birds of any species.
Our paddlecraft crew and the seventh diner enjoyed a sort of short symbiotic relationship. For our part, we had turned on the lights, which added a small amount of warmth and drew in moths and other phototropic insects. The lights also provided him with daytime illumination for night-time hunting. We also thoughtfully exhaled carbon dioxide to lure mosquitos into the pavilion.
For his part, the Black-and-white Warbler wolfed down numerous mosquitos that otherwise might have taken involuntary blood donations from us. But that was just a small bonus. He filled up his side of the benefit ledger with serendipity: the unsought rarity of his close and continued presence. He graced us with gifts far more spiritual than carbon dioxide and night-time light. He ignited excitement and joy, fired wonder and the repetition of “wow” to their highest pitch of the trip. He gave us closer and more prolonged looks at a wild, free, and beautifully patterned wood warbler than any of us thought possible.
Ninth day of our Suwannee River canoe trip and layover day at the Holton Creek River Camp. Our cabin fits snugly into the mature forest just back from the rim of a sand bluff. Both the camp and its substantial buffer of state-owned land (approximately 4,500 acres) are named for the small feeder stream that enters the Suwannee 4 river miles east of its confluence with the Alapaha River. Holton Creek’s public wild protects the Suwannee’s winding corridor for almost 6 miles on river-right.
The long-distance Florida Trail runs right through the river camp. After breakfast, we hiked upstream on the well-maintained and orange-blazed route. Early on I gave Page, and myself, the usual admonition to be on the lookout for venomous snakes, especially the formidable diamondback rattler. The track frequently runs atop the bankside bluffs, providing unimpeded views of the Suwannee and the moss-hung live oaks arching far out over the river, one botanical symbol of the Deep South bearded with the waving banners of another. The sandbars shelved high above the water like the one we had camped on two nights before. The woodland route led us past sinkholes and through a forest of pines grown tall—slash, loblolly, a few spruce (spruce pine, Pinus glabra)—and oaks grown thick. Many of the larger laurel oaks had rapidly grown to girths of 10 feet and more. The most impressive of the trailside laurel oaks—leaves still dark green, bark dark and deeply furrowed—measured 19 feet 6 inches in circumference at dbh.
The sky cleared to mostly sunny by the time we crossed the bridge over Mitchell Creek near the eastern boundary of the Holton Creek tract. After days of cloudy weather, the white sandbars glistened sugar-bright again. The sun varnished the Suwannee’s surface to a beautiful black satin; its mirror-perfect surface captured and kept the inadvertent artistry of its phenomenal reflections again. Blackwater witchery was back at work. Live oaks arched low over the water toward their rising bole-doubles, almost forming a full flattened wreath of two green-leaved trees. Flimsy wisps of Spanish moss stood straight up with stemless rigidity from their holdfast branches in the water below, their narrow ends pointing toward the breathable sky.
We kept hiking for perhaps another half mile before sitting down for an early lunch atop a prominent bluff overlooking a straight stretch of river, a long, slow-gliding sweep of black glass in the sun. After a twenty-minute break we began our backtrack, Page in the lead, the sky now all bright and cloudless blue. The day was unusually warm for the middle third of November, easily seventy-eight to eighty degrees. A few minutes after we recrossed the creek, I took a couple of quick steps toward Page and yelled whoa!, whoa!!, whoa!!!—each command louder and more emphatic—as I pulled her back by yanking on both of her shoulders. Her second jolt of danger came a New York nanosecond later, when she first spotted the obviously very large snake already airborne in its leap to our right away from the footpath’s tread.
Arm’s length behind Page’s ball-capped head, I didn’t witness the startled snake launch from its coil. I first saw the long and powerfully thick snake in good and close focus as it began to crawl diagonally to its left. Identification came in quick sequence: the large triangular pit-viper head, the impressive rack of rattles, the sheer size and bulk of the legless reptile, the prominent diamond pattern chain-linked across its back. A rattler. An eastern diamondback rattlesnake: the largest venomous snake in the whole country.
We both stood still and tracked the impressively large pit viper’s movement as it rapidly crawled toward a clump of saw palmetto 10 or 11 feet diagonally back and to the right from our direction of travel. After reaching the fanned cover of the palmetto, the diamondback rattler reeled itself into a tight coil, a defensive posture, head up and looking our way. We stood there for a few moments, silent and still and dazed, the danger and dread of the what-if coming to full crisis in our minds.
We walked further up the track, breaking visual and psychological contact with that scary, big, and dangerous snake. We replayed our close-call encounter with the rattler, described what we had seen and when. Neither of us could say exactly how close Page had come to the pit viper’s hypodermic fangs. I never clearly saw the coiled snake on the trail. A subconscious early warning system fired off the alarm before the threat became conscious thought. I had been walking behind Page and must have been scanning the treadway with the low-level radar of long-time hikers, one that I’m usually not aware of until it sends me jumping at a stick snake. All I had remembered afterwards was that a vague impression of an indistinct pattern—something unusual, maybe only the shape, I’m not sure—had breached that instinctive system that seems to operate independently below the surface of the mind’s internal chatter.
Page hadn’t noticed the thick-bodied specimen that had recently come to coil in the light gap of the trail, peacefully sunning itself on a beautiful fall day. My best sense of her distance from danger when I grabbed her was that two more of her short strides would have landed her lead foot directly on or very close to the venomous diamondback. If we had not spotted that rounded pile of pit viper in the time it took for her to take two more fairly quick strides, a second to a second and a half at most, she might have been in the deepest of available dangers.
We started hiking back to camp again, but after less than 100 yards Page stopped and asked me what I would have done if she had been bitten by that shockingly big diamondback. I tried to remain positive and parry the question by saying, “you probably would have spotted it after another step.” She replied, “I’m not at all sure of that, I had been looking up in the trees for birds and not paying attention to the trail.” After a short pause she continued. “What would you have done? Would you have left me and walked out fast for help? Would you have stayed with me? Would you have helped me walk out?” We discussed the various scenarios, but I had no quick-fix, optimum answer for her. I told her I wouldn’t leave her unless absolutely necessary, and helping her walk out seemed the best of the three painful plans … until we were forced into plan B.
Her new fancy iPhone was back at river camp, and service had been spotty along the river for days. We didn’t pack our very old Sawyer snakebite kit, the one that utilizes suction only. I hadn’t seen or thought about that kit for over a decade and had no idea if it was actually effective. We don’t own a satellite phone or one of those emergency beacons that send out GPS coordinates to summon help. I knew how to treat for shock and had long known that cutting was considered malpractice. I hadn’t taken a first aid course in over thirty years, and back then the instructor’s only answer to a backwoods snakebite scenario was “get the victim to a hospital as fast as possible.” Neither of us knew the most recent guidelines for treating a backcountry snakebite. We didn’t know if a loosely applied tourniquet, one that restricted blood flow but didn’t cause the limb to go numb, would be beneficial.
We realized we were woefully unprepared for a pit-viper emergency, especially a diamondback bite. The what-if weighed heavily on our minds for a short time. Page asked me to lead the rest of the way back. The size and sudden appearance of the snake had spooked me enough to keep my mind on full focus.
The belly-crawling diamondback stretched out to a few inches over 6 feet long and muscled up much thicker than any other wild snake, including the far shorter but chunky cottonmouths and timber rattlesnakes, I had encountered in North America. Years ago I had walked up on a very large bullsnake while hiking in the shortgrass prairie of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park. That ophidian had been longer, somewhere quite close to either side of 6 feet 6 inches best estimation, but the diamondback’s impressive bulk ranked it the overall larger serpent. The grassland snake wasn’t even a close second. The diamondback was also far more menacing than the nonvenomous bullsnake. The rattler had unnerved us enough that we didn’t think of taking photos while we had the close-up chance, and didn’t stop to chide ourselves over the lost opportunity until we were well away. Neither of us broached the subject of going back.
Back home we researched the rattlesnake in an excellent source: the book Snakes of the Southeast written by Whit Gibbons and Mike Dorcas. Their description begins with this sentence: “Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes are very heavy bodied snakes with large, dark, diamond-shaped markings outlined with white on a brown, gray, or yellowish background.”
Our close-call snake had been yellowish. The graphic at the lower right corner of the page showed their maximum length as 8 feet. A sidebar box entitled “How dangerous are they?” had this to say on that subject:
Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes are potentially the most dangerous snakes in the United States. Their venom is highly toxic, and adults can inject much more of it than smaller venomous species can inject. The venom rapidly destroys tissues and blood cells, and bites not treated with antivenom have resulted in deaths within 24 hours. Fortunately, eastern diamondbacks are usually very reluctant to defend themselves against humans by biting except as a last resort or when they have been completely surprised and feel threatened. If you see one in the field, you should consider yourself fortunate (many herpetologists have never seen one) and watch it from a safe distance.
Notes
* On a clear day, the low-water upper Suwannee is a glistening black in the sunny center, a dark amber color in the shallows near shore, and a yellowish hue up against the white sandbars. All of the Suwannee’s uppermost branches head in the Okefenokee Swamp. The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge encompasses approximately 406,650 acres. And over all that mostly watery land—the piney islands, the cypress and bay forests, the incredibly dense shrub thickets, the lakes, the lily-pad and grass prairies, the peat deposits, the wetland wildflowers and mosses—the Okefenokee is one giant, tannin-filled teabag that stains the swamp water dark before it flows away as the Suwannee.
1 Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor moss; it is a free-swinging epiphyte.
2 The bald cypress is a botanical anomaly; it is a deciduous conifer. Taxodium distichum is called bald because it sheds its needles in the fall.
3 Only the female Wood Duck vocalizes the loud and squealing flight call.
4 The Black-and-white Warbler’s winter range includes all of Florida except for the westernmost panhandle below Alabama. The Woods Ferry warbler could have remained right where he was all winter, flown further south in Florida, or even migrated all the way down to Cuba and its neighboring islands. This songbird’s length is frequently listed as 5¼ inches.
