Seasons of South Florida

Right now, we are in the middle of one of my personal favorite ‘seasons’: sea turtle nesting season. In particular, July is the time when some of the earliest laid nests of the season are beginning to hatch, so we are in the overlap time of both nesting females and emerging hatchlings.

The rainy season is starting to get in gear. This time we’re going to be talking about a species that undergoes one of the most dramatic changes of them all.

In April, there is one bird that has taken a long journey and is just starting to arrive. They are the reason why this time of year is always one of my favorites. Swallow-tailed kites are back.

Have you been paying attention to the birds recently? If so, you might have noticed that their behavior has shifted a bit. That’s because the time of year is mating season for most birds in south Florida.

We’re now in the middle of the dry season here in Florida. We see the effects of this everywhere. The water in ponds recedes and their banks expand. The cypress trees lose their needles and animals shift their behavior to correspond to the changing environment.

Because of the near-constant warmth here, we have a huge number of year-round avian residents, so it can be easy to forget about our migrants. However, there are plenty of birds that use Florida only as a wintering-ground.

Here in South Florida, we don’t get the same seasons like they do up north. I admit that I still feel a bit nostalgic for autumn and winter at times. While we are technically only ‘subtropical’ here, we experience a rainy season and a dry season much like those that occur in the tropics.