From the observation deck, Boone tells how the dry-season drawdown of Upper Myakka Lake concentrates alligators and wading birds into one of the great wildlife spectacles in Florida.
Stand here at the rail a minute, and let the lake talk to you. In the wet season this is a wide, shining sheet of water, calm as glass. But come the dry months, when the rains quit and the lake shrinks back into its bed, something happens out here that folks travel from all over the world to see. Everything that was spread across this whole basin gets squeezed into what water's left — and the gators come. Dozens of them. Down at the Deep Hole, south of here, they pile in by the hundreds — one of the thickest gatherings of wild alligators anywhere on this earth. And above them, the birds: great white clouds of ibis and egret, wood storks and spoonbills, herons standing like statues, all drawn to the same shrinking water and the fish trapped in it. At dusk the whole lake comes alive — and the bellow of a bull gator is a sound older than the dinosaurs; it rolls right across this deck and into your chest. This isn't a zoo, friend. Nobody arranged it. This is just wild Florida, doing what it's done for ten thousand years, right here in front of you. Take a long look. You won't forget it.