IN THE EVERGLADES — On a recent crisp October afternoon, a flotilla of 16 airboats rev up their Cadillac engines and head out into the far corners of the approximately 74,000-acre Miccosukee reservation.
Single-file they skim over sawgrass and between cypress stands, heading north, away from the civilization built up along Tamiami Trail.
On board the boats are tribal elders to lead the way, scientists to take water samples and Miccosukee parents teaching their kids how to steer the airboats, fish and recognize landmarks.
The parade of airboats is partaking in the tribe’s annual Everglades Study, which the Miccosukee have conducted each October since 1982. The study is a mix of both science and cultural survival.
Over the course of a week the tribe and scientists visit 81 culturally significant destinations with names such as “Monkey Tree,” “Burning Chickee” and “Smallpox Tommie,” looking for pollution but also showing young Miccosukee where they come from.
One of the elders on board was the 68-year-old Michael Frank, the last Miccosukee tribal member to live on an Everglades tree island.
The tree islands, slightly raised areas that built up as the River of Grass flowed around them for 5,000 years, saved the Miccosukee tribe in the 19th century.
In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was used to force Indians to give up their land in Florida and move to west. The Miccosukee fought back, taking part in the Seminole Wars. In the process, they left other parts of Florida and fled to the Everglades.
The swampy wilderness saved them from thousands of U.S. troops. Brutal conditions favored the Indians, and the tree islands provided them with hiding places, homes and food in the form of deer, turtles and fish.
Tribal members today descend from a few hundred survivors of those wars.
These days, Frank walks gingerly on knees that are “bone-to-bone” due to cartilage degeneration, but as a teen he hunted deer, turtles, ducks, “whatever I could get that was edible,” he says. The Everglades provided. It doesn’t provide nearly as much today.
Human-made flooding and pollution have taken a toll. High water levels in the reservation have depleted wildlife and weakened tree islands, the very landscape that saved the Miccosukee during wartime. Saving them, and the Everglades, is why the study exists.
They wind their way to the first stop and lead hydrologist Amy Castaneda and her team hop out of their airboat to measure water temperature, depth, phosphorus pollution, turbidity, pH. Frank says the tribe started noticing changes in water levels, vegetation and wildlife abundance when Tamiami Trail grew into a more substantial highway in the 1960s.
The road acts as a dam, causing the reservation, which is downstream from Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades Agricultural Area, to flood. Flooding is natural in the Everglades, but the road causes the water to stay too high for too long, killing wildlife and tree islands.
Since 1982 the tribe has used data from the study to sue government entities, including the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, over phosphorus levels.
“They won that lawsuit and that’s why we have STAs (stormwater treatment areas that help clean phosphorus pollution) now and we have different parts of CERP (the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan),” says Castaneda.
Part of those plans include adding more bridges to the Tamiami Trail, so as to drain the reservation in a natural way.
When viewed from above, healthy sections of the Everglades take on a corrugated appearance of ridges and sloughs aligned by the southerly flow of the river of grass. These are the elevated tree islands and slightly depressed wet areas whose topography offer some dry areas, some wet areas, some deep and shallow areas — more habitat for more animals, thus more resplendent biodiversity.
“Last year (2024) was a very high water year, so we measured water depth on top of the tree islands. Some had over 18 inches of water on top of them,” says Castaneda. This year is different. South Florida has been parched by an extreme drought since early 2025, and the cypress trees show water marks two or three feet higher than current levels.
A walk in the swamp
At the second stop they get out of the airboats and Frank leads a crew over limestone flats covered in 6 inches of water, low from the 2025 drought. Frank says the water here was thigh-high last year.
Frank uses a cypress walking stick to trudge through shin-deep water. It’s easy to slip on limestone covered in slime, or trip over a cypress knee. At one point he takes a machete to cut down a stick for one of the hydrologists who’s been working for the tribe long enough to become a friend.
He leaves the stump tall, so future hikers can see it in high water and not trip.
They walk to the western boundary of the reservation, which is marked by a survey stone separating Indian land from Big Cypress National Preserve.
Frank tells the other hikers that a bit west of here, in Big Cypress, the tribe successfully sued to stop an oil well operation. “They don’t quit,” Frank said.
What’s in a tree island?
Tribe member Sheena Tigertail, one of the airboat drivers, has a baby seat strapped to the boat for her very agile 3-year-old son. She sets him free when we pull up to another tree island for lunch. Her other children have tagged along as well.
Tomorrow she and the other boat pilots will take out dozens of Miccosukee kids to see remote but culturally important sites. “I like being out in the ‘Glades. I was raised out here. I want to see the difference every year — water level, vegetation,” she said. “We go to the same places every year and things do change.”
She said she takes her kids out so they can see how she was raised and keep the culture going. She wants her kids to have a sense of what the Everglades look like now so they have something to compare it to when they’re older. Maybe it’ll improve, maybe it’ll be degraded — but they’ll have a vision to fight for.
When we pull up to a cypress dome with a hunting camp hidden inside it, lead biologist Marcel Bozas explains that though tree island areas are slightly elevated, cypress domes are actually subtle depressions where water-loving cypress trees thrive.
The trees toward the center of cypress domes tend to be older and taller. The center also tends to be deeper water, so cypress grow faster there as well. The result, when viewed from afar, are long, graceful humps on the landscape.
Tree islands, too, have a look defined by water. The upstream head of the island is to the north, and the islands slope down to the south.
“Flood-intolerant hardwoods such a gumbo limbo trees, or occasionally live oaks, live on the head,” Bozas said, “and as you move down the slope you get species that are more flood-tolerant, such as cocoplums, willows and then eventually towards the tail, it tapers off into the marsh.”
Tree islands are crucial to land mammals such as deer, bobcats, and panthers. “They need that dry elevation just to escape the water level, and to rest,” said Bozas.
The wetter cypress domes are more suited to semiaquatic species such as alligators, river otters and even black bears. “The bears could be foraging on plant matter, they could be foraging on insects,” said Bozas. They also use the domes as cover.
“We’ve had a lot of extreme flood events over the past couple decades,” said Bozas. “1995 was a big, big flood. The rainwater should have flown south, but the Tamiami Trail blocked it. The gates were closed. … We had an extra two or three feet of water than what we currently see on the landscape right now.”
Bozas’ studies as well as others have shown that after about 60 days of flooding, there are significant wildlife die-offs. The deer that Frank once hunted have dropped off.
The stretch from 2017 to 2020 was particularly severe. The flooding is specific to Water Conservation Area 3A, where the reservation sites, because canal levees act as a funnel of sorts, for water flowing down from the water conservation areas west of Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, as well as some overflow from Big Cypress.
“It all converges in 3A South, which doesn’t have enough outlets,” says Bozas. “That water should flow down into Everglades National Park and out to the coast.”
CERP is adding outlets. More than three miles of bridging was added in recent years.
The expectation is that these flood events will improve with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, but that will depend on how much of Tamiami Trail they open up, Bozas said.
“The tribe advocates for trying to bridge as much of it as possible, just let the water flow naturally. They’re putting some bridges in now, but it’s insufficient. It’s still going to have a bottleneck. It won’t be as profound, but it’s still going to be problematic.”
The blob
It’s not just water levels. Phosphorus pollution has drastically changed the Everglades. The plants of the ecosystem can survive on very little phosphorus, a nutrient all plants need to function.
But the reservation is downstream from the massive Everglades Agricultural Area, where farms douse their crops with fertilizer.
Even though stormwater treatment areas soak up much of that phosphorus, some of it seeps into the Everglades and thus the reservation, allowing non-Everglades plant populations to explode. “Near the canals you can see the vegetation shift — cattails, certain grasses, and willows take over,” said Castaneda.
“They have to cut back some of the airboat trails because there’s so much unwelcome vegetation due to nutrients flowing in from agricultural land upstream,” she said.
“The Blob” is a case in point.
Castaneda described how a canal that drains agricultural areas south of Lake Okeechobee and empties the reservation has changed things. There should be a mosaic of sawgrass and tear-drop shaped tree islands there. Instead, when viewed from above or on Google Maps, there’s a 4,000-acre blob of green overgrowth, a monocrop of sorts that alters the Everglades.
“The blob is increasing,” Castaneda said. And that’s with strict phosphorous limits. If nutrient pollution were allowed to flow unchecked, if the Miccosukee did have the data they collect every year, this kind of blob could overwhelm the tree island and slough mosaic that’s so enticing to the fish, birds, snakes, turtles, rabbits, deer and everything that eats them, including panthers and people.
These are problems to be addressed by the $23 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project, a state and federal effort so restore water flow to as natural a state as possible.
Many CERP infrastructure projects are complete, but many are not.
“On a broad scale, the tribe wants everglades restoration. The details might not be exactly what the tribe would have advocated for, but CERP in general, yes, the tribe wants everglades restoration. They would like to see all the canals backfilled, the levees removed, clean water freely flowing through outlets to allow it to go south.”
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.