Cane Toad Rhinella marina

A South American toad brought in to eat cane beetles, which it did not, and which now turns up on Florida lawns at night the size of a dinner plate. Behind each eye is a large triangular gland, and the milky venom it releases is what makes this a dog problem rather than a frog: a dog that mouths one can be in serious trouble within minutes.

Take care Danger · Invasive

What to do Keep dogs away from toads at night, and off the lawn after rain. If your dog mouths one, wipe the gums and tongue with a cloth, rinse the mouth with a hose pointed downwards and out for several minutes so it does not swallow, and ring a vet straight away.

Where to look lawns, driveways and anywhere a light draws insects after dark

Best time warm wet nights, on lit lawns · May–Sep

Listen for A low, slow, rattling trill that runs on and on — more like a distant tractor idling than a frog. The native southern toad’s trill is higher, shorter and musical.

Tell it apart very large, with a big triangular gland behind each eye and no ridges across the crown; native southern toads are far smaller

Alligator Alligator mississippiensis

Florida’s state reptile, and in spring the loudest thing on the canal. A bull bellows partly below the pitch a human ear can reach, and the sound is strong enough to throw the water off his own back in a fine dancing spray — you feel the note before you hear it.

Take care Danger

What to do Never feed one — a fed gator loses its fear of people and has to be destroyed. Keep pets and small children back from the water’s edge, and give any gator on the bank a wide berth.

Where to look basking on sunny banks, or holding log-still mid-canal

Best time warm, sunny middays · Apr–Sep

Listen for Warm spring nights, when the bulls answer each other across the water; courtship runs April into May. Hatchlings chirp from inside the egg to tell their mother to dig them out.

Manatee Trichechus manatus latirostris

The first manatee ever recorded in Lake County arrived in 2015, and was named Leesburg for the city where she was first seen. She had a calf in the summer of 2017 — Sunset. In December 2019 a boat struck her, and she died of the injuries on 9 January 2020, carrying a near-full-term calf. A few have wandered up the chain since, most often in the warm months. They are kin to elephants, not to seals.

Take care Protected

What to do Protected under federal law: never touch, feed, chase or crowd one, and keep the boat at idle when one is near.

Where to look slow water mid-canal — watch for a swirl and a round snout surfacing

Best time calm, sunny days · Jul–Aug

River Otter Lontra canadensis

Built for the water and plainly enjoying it — and able to stay under for as long as eight minutes when it wants to. A family keeps regular “latrine” spots along the bank, worn bare and left scented: less a mess than a noticeboard, read by every otter that passes.

Where to look along the banks near fallen trees and root tangles

Best time dawn & dusk · Oct–Apr

Listen for High, sharp chirps traded back and forth while they splash — more bird than mammal until you spot the wake.

Peninsula Cooter Pseudemys peninsularis

The turtle on the log, and usually most of the other turtles on the log as well. Look at its head: two pale stripes double back on themselves like hairpins, which nothing else here does. Dozens more yellow lines run down the shell, the legs and the tail, so a basking cooter is effectively pin-striped from end to end.

Where to look half-sunken logs and snags across from the dock, usually several at once

Best time mid-morning to mid-afternoon, once the sun is on the logs · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart hairpin-shaped pale stripes on the head, and a yellow — not red — belly

Florida Red-bellied Cooter Pseudemys nelsoni

She sometimes buries her eggs inside a living alligator’s nest mound — the warmest, best-guarded nursery in Florida, kept by a guard who would happily eat her. Raccoons dig up ordinary turtle nests; almost nothing digs up an alligator’s. Look for her among the peninsula cooters on the basking logs, the one with red in her shell.

Where to look basking logs at the canal’s edge, usually shoulder to shoulder with the peninsula cooters

Best time mid-morning, once the sun is on the logs · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a yellow head-stripe running between the eyes to a point like an arrowhead, two small cusps notching the upper jaw, and a belly that is red, not yellow

Red-eared Slider Trachemys scripta elegans

The world’s most traded pet turtle, and the reason it is here: bought small, outgrown, and let go. It is native to the Mississippi drainage, not Florida, and releasing one has been against state rule for years — but the ones already out are breeding, and interbreeding with the native sliders. The red ear-patch is the giveaway.

Take care Invasive

Where to look basking among the cooters, and around any bank people feed from

Best time sunny afternoons on the logs · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart a broad red or orange patch behind the eye — no native turtle here has one

Florida Softshell Turtle Apalone ferox

The largest softshell turtle in North America, and it does not look like a turtle at all: flat as a dropped pancake, leathery instead of hard, with a nose drawn out into a snorkel. It lies buried in the bottom with only that nose at the surface, waiting. When it does come out to bask it does so on the bank, alone, never on the log with the cooters.

Where to look buried in soft bottom in the shallows, or hauled out flat on a muddy bank

Best time warm mornings, on open bank rather than logs · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart a soft, leathery, pancake-flat shell and a long tubular snout; no scutes and no hard rim

Common Snapping Turtle Chelydra serpentina

The one that is nearly always there and nearly never seen. It spends its life on the bottom, buried and waiting for something to swim within reach, and it almost never climbs out to bask — when it does float, only the ridged back breaks the surface. In the water it would far rather leave than fight. Out of it, cornered on a road, it has no shell to hide in and defends itself the only way it can.

Where to look the canal bottom, and crossing open ground in nesting season

Best time any month; most often seen crossing land in late spring · May–Jun

Tell it apart a big ridged shell, a long saw-toothed tail and a head too large to pull in

Gopher Tortoise Gopherus polyphemus

A landlord. Its burrow runs up to forty feet back into the sand and holds a steady temperature all year, and more than 350 other animals have been recorded sheltering in one — including the eastern indigo snake, which depends on them. Dig up a tortoise and you evict a neighbourhood. That is why they are protected, and why the burrows are too.

Take care Protected

Where to look dry sandy uplands and roadside scrub — never at the water

Best time warm mornings, grazing near the burrow mouth · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart stumpy elephantine hind feet, flattened shovel-like forelegs, and a domed brown shell; it walks on land and does not swim

Florida Box Turtle Terrapene bauri

A land turtle that can shut itself away completely. A hinge across the underside lets the front and back of the plastron fold up against the shell like a drawbridge, sealing it in behind bone — no other turtle here can do it. The shell is high-domed and marked with radiating yellow lines on dark brown, like light through a cracked door.

Where to look damp leaf litter at the wood’s edge, lawns and shaded yards

Best time mornings after rain, when they move about · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart a high domed shell with radiating yellow lines, and a hinged underside that closes flat

Eastern Musk Turtle Sternotherus odoratus

The stinkpot, and it earns the name: four glands under the shell rim release a drop each when it is handled, and the smell is memorable. You will rarely see it swim. It walks the bottom instead, bumping along in the shallows looking for something to eat, and it climbs — people find them sunning several feet up in a streamside bush.

Where to look walking the canal bottom in the shallows, and sometimes up in bankside branches

Best time warm evenings, or by torchlight off the dock · May–Sep

Tell it apart small and dark, with two pale stripes on the side of the head and barbels under the chin

Loggerhead Musk Turtle Sternotherus minor

A small turtle with a head built far too big for it — and the head is the point: the jaws are a nutcracker, and it lives on snails and freshwater mussels, crushing the shells outright. It wants clear water over limestone, so the spring runs are where to look for it rather than the canal.

Where to look clear limestone spring runs — Alexander Springs and Wekiwa rather than the canal

Best time bright middays in the spring runs · May–Aug

Tell it apart an outsized head with a pale, dark-spotted throat, and a shell with three low keels when young

Striped Mud Turtle Kinosternon baurii

A palm-sized turtle of ditches and shallow wet edges, and the one mud turtle here you can name at a glance. Three pale stripes run the length of the brown shell and two more run along each side of the face. It spends the dry spells buried and waits.

Where to look ditches, marshy edges and temporary pools rather than open water

Best time after rain, when the shallow places refill · Mar–May, Sep–Oct

Tell it apart three pale stripes down the shell and two yellow stripes on each side of the head

Florida Mud Turtle Kinosternon steindachneri

Found in Florida and nowhere else on Earth, and easy to walk past: a small, plain, dark turtle with nothing much written on it. That blankness is the identification — our other small turtle of the same places, the striped mud turtle, is striped three times over on the shell and twice more on the face. This one is not.

Where to look ditches, ponds and marshy shallows; it will cross open ground between them

Best time after rain, in the shallow wet places · Mar–May, Sep–Oct

Tell it apart small, dark and unmarked — no shell stripes and no bold face stripes

Florida Chicken Turtle Deirochelys reticularia chrysea

Built round a neck. Stretched out it is nearly as long as the shell, which is a strange thing to watch on a basking log, and the shell itself carries a fine net of yellow lines. The Florida form lives in the peninsula and nowhere else, and it prefers a quiet weedy pond or ditch to open water — it will walk overland when one dries up.

Where to look weedy ponds, ditches and marsh edges away from the main channel

Best time spring mornings, on logs in the quieter ponds · Mar–May

Tell it apart an extraordinarily long neck, a net of fine yellow lines on the shell, and vertically striped hind legs

Swallow-tailed Kite Elanoides forficatus

The most beautiful bird that flies over this canal, and it barely touches down: it takes insects and lizards on the wing, and drinks by skimming a mouthful off the surface without stopping. Black and white, with a long forked tail it steers with. In late summer the whole population leaves for southern Brazil — five thousand miles.

Where to look high over the cypress and the open water, circling and never flapping much

Best time spring and summer, soaring on warm afternoons · Mar–Aug

Tell it apart a deep FORKED tail and clean white body with black wings — nothing else here has the shape

Red-shouldered Hawk Buteo lineatus

The hawk you hear over the canal. It is the common woodland hawk of Florida, it perches low and calls constantly, and its call is copied so exactly by blue jays that half of them are a lie. Rusty shoulders and breast, and a black-and-white chequered pattern along the wings that shows even from below.

Where to look low branches, posts and wires at the wood’s edge, near water

Best time any month, perched low or circling · Year-round

Listen for A loud, ringing kee-ah kee-ah, repeated. Blue jays imitate it almost perfectly, so half the ones you hear are jays.

Tell it apart rusty barred underparts, and narrow white bands across a black tail

Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis

Bigger and heavier than the red-shouldered, and a bird of open ground rather than wood: it sits on a pole over a field and waits. From below, the brick-red upper tail catches the light when it banks, which is the only mark most people ever need. Its voice has been borrowed by Hollywood for every eagle ever filmed.

Where to look roadside poles, pasture edges and open sky — less often over the canal itself

Best time any month, on poles and soaring over open ground · Oct–Mar

Listen for The scream every film uses for a bald eagle. It is this bird, dubbed over almost every raptor on screen.

Tell it apart a brick-RED upper tail on an adult, and a dark belly band across pale underparts

American Kestrel Falco sparverius

North America’s smallest falcon, and no bigger than a dove: rusty back, blue-grey wings on the male, and two black stripes down a white face. It hunts from a wire, and hovers on fast wingbeats when there is nowhere to perch. Florida has its own resident subspecies, which does not migrate and is in trouble.

Take care Protected

What to do Florida’s resident subspecies is state-listed as Threatened: do not disturb a nest cavity or a nest box in use.

Where to look roadside wires, fence posts and dead snags over open ground

Best time any month, on wires and posts · Oct–Mar

Tell it apart tiny, with TWO black stripes down each side of the face and a rusty back

Cooper’s Hawk Accipiter cooperii

A bird-hunter built for it: short rounded wings and a long rudder of a tail, for threading through trees at speed after something smaller. If a feeder suddenly empties and the songbirds go silent, look up — this is usually why. Adults have a slate back, a rusty-barred breast and a hard red eye.

Where to look oak canopy and wooded edges, and around anywhere birds gather

Best time any month, in wooded edges and gardens · Sep–Mar

Tell it apart a long rounded-tipped tail and short wings; adult with a red eye and rusty barring

Northern Harrier Circus hudsonius

A hawk that hunts like an owl. It has a real facial disc — the same dish of stiff feathers that lets an owl find prey by ear — and it uses it, quartering low and slow over open marsh with its wings held in a shallow V. The white rump patch is the classic mark, but it sits on the BACK, so a bird overhead will not show it.

Where to look gliding low and unhurried over marsh and wet pasture, rarely far above the grass

Best time winter, low over open marsh · Nov–Feb

Tell it apart a shallow V to the wings, a long tail and an owlish face; a white rump seen only from above or behind

Short-tailed Hawk Buteo brachyurus

A Florida speciality, and almost never seen perched — it hangs very high and hunts by dropping on birds from above, which means the only view you get is a silhouette against the sky. It comes in two colour forms and the DARK one is the commoner here: blackish, with silvery flight feathers.

Where to look circling high over woodland edges and marsh — always look up, never along

Best time warm months, very high overhead · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart small and compact, soaring high; either dark with silvery flight feathers, or white-bellied with a dark hood

Merlin Falco columbarius

A small falcon with no interest in subtlety: it hunts small birds by flying them down in the open, fast and level, rather than stooping from height. Dark, heavily streaked underneath, with only a faint moustache where a peregrine has a bold one. It builds nothing — it takes over an old crow’s nest.

Where to look the tops of dead branches and poles with a clear view, near open ground or water

Best time winter, on bare perches over open ground · Nov–Feb

Tell it apart heavily streaked below with only a FAINT moustache stripe; the peregrine’s is a bold black helmet

Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus

The fastest animal alive. In a hunting stoop from height it passes two hundred miles an hour and kills the bird it hits with the impact. On a perch it is a heavy, broad-shouldered falcon with a black helmet down over the cheek and a finely barred chest, and it looks entirely capable of it.

Where to look over open water and high structures; a passing bird more than a resident one

Best time winter, usually high or on a tall structure · Oct–Feb

Tell it apart a bold black “helmet” down the cheek, and pointed wings held stiff

Black Vulture Coragyps atratus

It cannot smell, so it watches the turkey vultures and follows them down. Short-tailed, with a grey wrinkled head and white patches at the very tips of the wings, and it flaps far more than its neighbour. It is also the one that strips the rubber off cars — the Park Service hands out tarps in the Everglades because of it, and nobody knows why they do it.

Where to look circling over open ground, and perched in numbers on poles and roofs

Best time any month, all day · Year-round

Tell it apart a GREY wrinkled head, a short tail, and white only at the wingtips; it flaps in short bursts

Turkey Vulture Cathartes aura

One of very few birds with a real sense of smell, and an extraordinary one — it can find a carcass hidden under a closed forest canopy from the air. It rides thermals with its wings in a shallow V, rocking and tilting, and almost never flaps. The bald red head is for reaching inside things without carrying them away on its feathers.

Where to look riding thermals over the canal and the open country beyond

Best time any month, soaring from mid-morning · Year-round

Tell it apart a RED bald head, a longer tail, and silvery flight feathers along the whole rear edge of the wing; it rocks as it glides

Barred Owl Strix varia

The owl of this canal, and the one you are most likely to hear from the dock at dusk. Big, round-headed, with no ear tufts and dark brown eyes where most owls have yellow. Barred across the chest, streaked down the belly. It will call in daylight, and it will answer a decent imitation.

Where to look cypress and oak along the water, roosting on a shaded branch

Best time dusk and after dark; often awake by day · Year-round

Listen for Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-aaall? — eight or nine hooted notes, and often a pair answering each other across the water.

Tell it apart round head with NO ear tufts, and DARK brown eyes; barred chest over a streaked belly

Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus

The heavyweight. Ear tufts, a white throat and huge yellow eyes, and a grip strong enough to take a skunk or another owl. It builds nothing of its own: it takes over a hawk’s or a crow’s old nest, usually in a live oak hung with Spanish moss, and it does it in the middle of winter — owlets here are often out before anything else has started nesting.

Where to look tall pines and live oaks, and old hawk nests in the crowns

Best time after dark, and calling from midwinter · Oct–Mar

Listen for A series of deep, soft hoots — hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo — carrying a long way on a still night.

Tell it apart prominent EAR TUFTS, a white throat patch and yellow eyes — the barred owl has none of the three

Eastern Screech-Owl Megascops asio

A cat-sized owl that fits in a mailbox, and comes in two colours — grey and rust-red, both found here, sometimes in the same brood. It roosts jammed into a tree hollow with its eyes half shut and its bark-pattern plumage doing the rest, and people live beside one for years without knowing.

Where to look tree cavities, nest boxes and dense foliage in gardens and oak hammock

Best time after dark; roosting in holes by day · Sep–May

Listen for Not a screech at all: a soft descending whinny like a small horse, or a long even trill on one note.

Tell it apart small with EAR TUFTS and yellow eyes, grey or rusty red; a great horned owl is four times the size

Barn Owl Tyto alba

A white heart on a face, and the hearing to go with it: its ear openings are set at different heights on the skull, so a sound reaches one fractionally before the other and the owl can place it in three dimensions. It can catch a mouse in complete darkness, by ear alone, with its eyes shut.

Where to look barns, silos, culverts and structures near open fields; it hunts low over grass

Best time after dark, over open ground · Mar–May

Listen for A long, harsh, rasping shriek in the dark — no hooting at all, and genuinely unnerving the first time.

Tell it apart a white HEART-SHAPED face, dark eyes, and pale unmarked underparts; it looks ghostly in headlights

Chuck-will’s-widow Antrostomus carolinensis

The largest nightjar in North America, and you will hear it all spring without once seeing it: by day it lies lengthways along a branch and disappears into the bark. The gape is startling for the size of the bird, and it hunts moths on the wing at dusk. Ours breed here; the whip-poor-will only winters.

Where to look dry woodland near the water; roosting along branches by day

Best time after dark from spring into summer · Mar–Jul

Listen for It says its own name, slowly — chuck-will’s-WID-ow — over and over from the dark woods on a spring night.

Tell it apart larger and browner than the whip-poor-will, and it names itself in four slow syllables

Eastern Whip-poor-will Antrostomus vociferus

Heard far more than seen, and here it is barely heard either — Central Florida gets this bird in winter, when it is mostly silent, so the song belongs to somewhere else. The way most people meet one is in headlights: a pair of red eyeshine on a dark road, and a moth-like bird lifting off.

Where to look open woodland floor and quiet roads after dark

Best time winter nights, and mostly silent then · Nov–Feb

Listen for WHIP-poor-WILL, faster and higher than the chuck-will’s-widow, and repeated tirelessly.

Tell it apart smaller and greyer than the chuck-will’s-widow, with a shorter, faster three-note song

Common Nighthawk Chordeiles minor

Neither a hawk nor strictly nocturnal, which leaves the name nothing to stand on. It hunts insects at dusk on long thin wings, each one crossed by a clean white bar, flying with an erratic bat-like flicker. The booming you hear at the bottom of its display dive is the wind through its own feathers.

Where to look over the lake, lawns and any lit open space at last light

Best time dusk in the warm months, over open sky · Apr–Sep

Listen for A nasal PEENT over and over at dusk, and in display a hollow BOOM as the male pulls out of a dive — made by air through the wing feathers, not by its voice.

Tell it apart long pointed wings with a white BAR across each, and a bounding, erratic flight

Osceola Wild Turkey Meleagris gallopavo osceola

Florida has its own turkey and it lives nowhere else on Earth — the Osceola, found only on the peninsula. It is smaller and darker than the turkey of the rest of the country, with far less white barring in the wing. A gobbler in spring is iridescent bronze and green with a bare red and blue head.

Where to look oak hammock, pasture edges and pine flatwoods; often a small group walking

Best time early mornings, spring especially · Feb–May

Listen for The gobble carries half a mile on a still spring morning.

Tell it apart very dark wings with little white barring — the mark of the Florida subspecies

Florida Scrub-Jay Aphelocoma coerulescens

The only bird species on Earth found nowhere but Florida, and it is fussy about where: dry scrub kept open by fire, which is exactly the land people build on. Blue and grey with no crest, and famously unbothered by people. Young birds stay on to help their parents raise the next brood instead of leaving.

Take care Protected

What to do Federally threatened, and tame enough to land on you. Do not feed one — jays fed peanuts and birdseed nest weeks too early, before the caterpillars their chicks need have hatched.

Where to look dry sand scrub with low oaks — not the canal; a trip to the Ocala scrub

Best time mornings, in open scrub · Feb–May

Listen for A harsh, rasping call, quite unlike a blue jay’s clear whistle.

Tell it apart blue and grey with NO crest and no black necklace; a blue jay has both, plus white wing spots

Red-cockaded Woodpecker Dryobates borealis

The only woodpecker that carves its nest into a LIVING pine — everything else uses dead wood — and it takes years to do. It then drills small wells around the hole so resin runs down the trunk, which stops rat snakes climbing to the eggs. The red cockade the name promises is a few feathers on the male, effectively invisible.

Take care Protected

What to do Federally threatened since 2024, when it was downlisted from endangered. Keep well back from a cavity tree; the white resin bands mark one in use.

Where to look mature longleaf and slash pine with an open floor; not the canal

Best time mornings, in old open pine · Feb–May

Listen for A raspy, nasal sklit repeated as a family moves through the pines.

Tell it apart a big white cheek patch and a barred back; the red cockade is not a field mark at any distance

Muscovy Duck Cairina moschata

The big black-and-white duck with the red warty face, and it is not a wild bird: the ones here descend from escaped domestic stock. A true wild Muscovy is a shy tropical forest duck from Mexico southwards. These are a park duck, tame to the point of rudeness, and they hybridise with anything that will have them.

Take care Invasive

Where to look lawns, boat ramps and anywhere people feed ducks

Best time any month, all day · Year-round

Tell it apart red, warty, bare skin round the face and bill; nothing native here has it

Ring-necked Duck Aythya collaris

Named for a mark almost nobody has ever seen. The drake does carry a chestnut ring round the neck, and it is invisible at any normal distance — what you actually see is a bold WHITE ring round the bill, which the bird is not named after. Peaked head, black back, pale flanks. Winter only.

Where to look the open middle of the lakes and the canal mouth, in small rafts

Best time winter, on open water · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart a peaked, angular head and a white ring round the BILL; scaup have a rounded head and a grey back

Lesser Scaup Aythya affinis

The drake is a study in three tones: black at both ends, pale grey in the middle, with a head that glosses purple in good light. It dives for its food and spends the winter out on the open water in rafts. The hen is plain brown with a white patch at the base of the bill.

Where to look open water well off the bank, diving and resurfacing

Best time winter, out on the lakes · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart a ROUNDED head and a pale grey back; the ring-necked duck is peaked-headed with a black back

Hooded Merganser Lophodytes cucullatus

The drake raises and lowers a fan of a crest like a hand of cards — white bordered black when it is up, a flat dark lump when it is down, and it changes between one look at him and the next. It is a sawbill: the thin serrated beak is for gripping fish, which it chases underwater.

Where to look sheltered backwaters and canal edges rather than the open lake

Best time winter mornings on quiet water · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart a thin dark serrated bill, and a crest that goes up and down; no other duck here has either

Blue-winged Teal Spatula discors

A small, fast, early duck: it is among the first to arrive in autumn and the first to leave. The drake wears a bold white crescent across the front of a slate-grey face, which is the mark to look for, and both sexes flash a chalky powder-blue panel on the forewing when they go up.

Where to look shallow weedy margins and marsh ponds, in tight fast flocks

Best time autumn and winter, in the shallows · Sep–Feb

Tell it apart a white crescent on the drake’s face; a pale blue forewing patch on both sexes in flight

Mallard Anas platyrhynchos

Everyone knows the drake — bottle-green head, white collar, yellow bill. The problem is the hen, and it is a serious one here: released farmyard mallards interbreed with Florida’s own mottled duck, and a hen mallard and a mottled duck look nearly the same. State biologists call that the single biggest threat to the native bird.

Take care Invasive

Where to look park ponds and anywhere ducks are fed; less often on wild water

Best time winter, and year-round where birds are fed · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart a hen mallard has a WHITE-edged tail and a dark streak through a pale face; a mottled duck has neither, and an unstreaked buff throat

Northern Shoveler Spatula clypeata

The bill is the whole bird: a great spatula lined inside with hundreds of comb-like plates, so the duck can swim head-down with its beak in the water and strain out the plankton. Flocks sometimes spin in a circle together to pull food up from below. The drake is green-headed, white-chested and chestnut-flanked.

Where to look shallow weedy water, swimming with the bill down and the head swinging

Best time winter, in the shallows · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart an oversized spoon-shaped bill, held low in the water; nothing else here comes close

American Wigeon Mareca americana

An outlaw among ducks. It cannot dive, so it waits beside the ones that can — coots especially — and takes the weed off them as they surface. The drake has a broad green stripe back from the eye and a cream crown so pale it earned the old name baldpate. It also grazes on land like a small goose.

Where to look open water beside rafts of coots, and grazing on grassy edges

Best time winter, on the open lakes and the banks · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart a green eye-stripe and a whitish crown on the drake, and a small blue-grey bill with a black tip

Egyptian Goose Alopochen aegyptiaca

An African bird that is not really a goose — it is a shelduck — and it is not supposed to be here at all. Escaped ornamental stock has bred its way across Florida over the last few decades, and it is still spreading into the centre. Look for the dark chocolate patch round each eye, like smudged eyeliner.

Take care Invasive

Where to look mown grass beside water, golf courses and retention ponds

Best time any month, on open lawns and banks · Mar–May

Tell it apart a dark chocolate patch around each eye, a pink bill and legs, and a big white wing flash in flight

Common Loon Gavia immer

You will not see the black-and-white chequerboard bird from the postcards: loons spend the winter here in plain grey and white, and the tremolo call belongs to northern lakes in summer. Its bones are solid rather than hollow, which is what lets it sink and chase fish — and why it needs a long taxiing run to get airborne.

Where to look the open water of the bigger lakes, diving for long periods

Best time winter, well out on the big lakes · Jan–Feb

Tell it apart a heavy dagger bill held LEVEL on a low-riding body — a cormorant rides just as low but holds its hooked bill tilted up

Laughing Gull Leucophaeus atricilla

The gull that sounds like it is enjoying itself — a long descending cackle that carries right across a parking lot. In summer the head is jet black with white crescents round the eye; in winter that goes, leaving a smudged grey wash behind the ear. It is a coastal bird that comes inland in numbers.

Where to look open lakes, shorelines, car parks and anywhere with food

Best time warm months, all day · Mar–Oct

Listen for A rolling, descending laugh, ha-ha-ha-haah, falling away at the end.

Tell it apart a black hood in summer, a dark grey back, and dark red-black legs and bill

Ring-billed Gull Larus delawarensis

The commonest gull inland in winter, and the easiest to name: a clean black band right round the yellow bill, as though somebody had drawn on it. Pale grey back, white head, and YELLOW legs. It is the gull of car parks and lakeshores rather than the open sea.

Where to look open lakeshores, boat ramps and car parks

Best time winter, all day · Nov–Mar

Tell it apart a crisp black ring round a yellow bill, and yellow legs — the herring gull has a red spot and PINK legs

Herring Gull Larus argentatus

The big one. Half again the size of a ring-billed gull, with a heavy bill carrying a red spot near the tip instead of a black ring, and pink legs rather than yellow. It takes four years to grow into that adult plumage, which is why so many big gulls here are a confusing mottled brown.

Where to look the larger lakes and their shorelines, often with other gulls

Best time winter, on the bigger open water · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart PINK legs and a red spot on a heavy bill — the ring-billed gull has yellow legs and a black bill ring

Bonaparte’s Gull Chroicocephalus philadelphia

Small, buoyant and tern-like, it flies more like a marsh tern than a gull and feeds by picking off the surface. It is also the only gull in the world that habitually nests in trees — in spruce, up north, which is about as un-gull-like as a gull gets. In winter it shows a neat dark spot behind the eye.

Where to look open lakes, picking at the surface in loose flocks

Best time winter, on open water · Dec–Feb

Tell it apart small and delicate with a thin black bill, and a single dark ear-spot in winter

Forster’s Tern Sterna forsteri

A slim, pale, buoyant tern that hunts by hovering and dropping. Here it is almost always in winter dress, and that changes it completely: instead of a black cap it wears a black BANDIT MASK through the eye on an otherwise white head, which is the single most useful thing to know about terns on these lakes.

Where to look hovering over the open lakes and the canal mouth, then dropping

Best time autumn through spring, over open water · Sep–Mar

Tell it apart in winter, a BLACK EYE PATCH on a white head — not a black cap; slim orange-black bill

Caspian Tern Hydroprogne caspia

The largest tern in the world, and it looks it: gull-sized, heavy, with a great carrot of a bill you can see from a long way off. It flies with a slight downward tilt to the bill, hunting, and calls with a harsh grating croak that sounds much more like a heron than a tern.

Where to look over the bigger lakes and the canal mouth, often alone

Best time any month, over the open lakes · Mar–Oct

Listen for A harsh, low, grating croak — nothing like the light calls of the smaller terns.

Tell it apart gull-sized, with a very thick BRIGHT RED bill — Forster’s tern is half the size with a slim bill

Black Skimmer Rynchops niger

Built round one trick, and no other bird in the hemisphere shares it: the lower half of the bill is markedly longer than the upper, and the bird flies with it slicing the water, snapping shut on whatever it touches. Skimmers are also the only birds in the world whose pupils close to vertical slits, like a cat’s.

Where to look skimming the surface of calm open water, usually near dusk

Best time calm evenings, low over still water · May–Sep

Tell it apart a long lower mandible, black above and white below, with a red-and-black bill

Killdeer Charadrius vociferus

A shorebird that has given up on shores. It nests on gravel, car parks and flat roofs, and when you walk near the nest the adult staggers off dragging an apparently broken wing until you have followed it far enough away — then flies off perfectly well. Two black bands across the chest, and it says its own name.

Where to look gravel, short grass, lawn edges and bare open ground away from water

Best time any month, day or night · Year-round

Listen for A loud, insistent kill-DEER, kill-DEER, repeated — often the first thing you hear, day or night.

Tell it apart TWO black breast bands and a red eye-ring; most small plovers have only one band

Spotted Sandpiper Actitis macularius

It teeters. Constantly, the whole rear half of the body bobbing up and down as it walks, which names it from a hundred yards. The spots it is named for are breeding dress and you will not see them here — our birds are plain brown and white. The females are the ones that compete for mates, and the males do most of the sitting.

Where to look walking the very edge of the bank, alone, bobbing as it goes

Best time autumn through spring, at the water’s edge · Sep–Mar

Tell it apart the constant teetering, and a white shoulder-wedge in front of the folded wing; no spots in winter

Greater Yellowlegs Tringa melanoleuca

Long, elegant and loud. The legs really are that yellow, and the bird is usually heard before it is seen — a ringing three- or four-note alarm as it lifts off, which is why marsh birders call it the telltale. It strides through shallow water rather than picking at the edge.

Where to look wading the open shallows and flooded margins, alone or in twos

Best time autumn through spring, in the shallows · Sep–Mar

Listen for A ringing, urgent tew-tew-tew as it flushes, three or four notes falling away.

Tell it apart bright yellow legs and a long, slightly upturned bill longer than the head

Black-necked Stilt Himantopus mexicanus

Absurd, and deliberately so: relative to its body it has the longest legs of any bird on Earth except the flamingo, and they are bright coral pink. Black above, white below, with a needle of a bill. It wades deeper than anything else its size and complains loudly about everything.

Where to look flooded margins, shallow ponds and marsh edges

Best time spring through autumn, in shallow open water · Mar–Aug

Tell it apart impossibly long PINK legs, a needle-thin black bill, and clean black-and-white plumage

Wilson’s Snipe Gallinago delicata

A bird you almost always meet by accident: it sits tight in wet grass until you are a step away, then explodes upward in a zigzag with a rasping call. The bill is absurdly long and flexible at the tip, for feeling out worms in mud. In display it dives, and the sound it makes is its tail feathers, not its voice.

Where to look flooded grass, ditch margins and soggy ground — seen when flushed

Best time winter, in wet grass · Nov–Mar

Listen for A rasping scaip as it flushes. The winnowing hu-hu-hu of display flight is made by air over the outer TAIL feathers.

Tell it apart a very long straight bill and bold cream head-stripes; it flushes in a zigzag

Least Sandpiper Calidris minutilla

The smallest shorebird in the world — an ounce of bird, five inches long — and it is on the mud right in front of you, creeping along hunched over. Among the little brown sandpipers people lump together as peeps, this is the one with YELLOW-GREEN legs; the others have black ones.

Where to look exposed mud and shallow margins, creeping in small loose flocks

Best time autumn through spring, on mud and shallow edges · Aug–Mar

Tell it apart tiny, brown, and crouched, with YELLOW-GREEN legs — the other peeps have black legs

Prothonotary Warbler Protonotaria citrea

A blazing golden bird in a dark swamp, and the only warbler in the east that nests in a HOLE — an old woodpecker cavity or a hollow stump standing in water, which is exactly why a place like this one suits it. The name comes from the yellow robes of papal clerks.

Where to look shaded backwaters and cypress edges, low down over standing water

Best time spring and summer, low over shaded water · Apr–Jul

Listen for A loud, ringing sweet-sweet-sweet-sweet on one pitch, carrying right across the water.

Tell it apart solid GOLDEN head and breast against blue-grey wings, with no wing bars

Northern Parula Setophaga americana

A tiny blue-grey warbler with a yellow throat, and in Florida it builds its nest INSIDE a hanging clump of Spanish moss — which is why the mossy oaks along this canal suit it so well. The male wears a smudged rusty band across the yellow. It sings from high in the canopy.

Where to look high in live oaks and cypress hung with Spanish moss

Best time spring and summer, high in mossy oaks · Mar–Jul

Listen for A buzzy trill that climbs the scale and trips over its own end — zeeeeee-up.

Tell it apart blue-grey above with a YELLOW THROAT and a dark chest band, and two white wing bars

Palm Warbler Setophaga palmarum

The commonest winter warbler here, and it identifies itself by a habit rather than a colour: it wags its tail up and down constantly, on every lawn and path edge from October to April. Drab olive-brown with a yellow undertail, and it feeds on the ground far more than a warbler ought to.

Where to look lawns, path edges and low scrub — usually on the ground, not up in trees

Best time winter, on open ground · Oct–Mar

Tell it apart the constant TAIL-WAGGING, and a yellow undertail on an otherwise drab brown bird

Yellow-rumped Warbler Setophaga coronata

Birders call it the butter-butt, and that yellow rump patch really is the whole identification. It can digest the wax in bayberry and wax myrtle fruit, which almost no other warbler manages, and that one trick is why it winters this far north in flocks while the rest have gone to the tropics.

Where to look wax myrtle, oak edges and open scrub, in loose flocks

Best time winter, in restless flocks · Nov–Mar

Listen for A sharp, flat CHEK repeated from inside a flock — you hear it long before you pick out a bird.

Tell it apart a bright YELLOW RUMP patch, with yellow side patches; drab grey-brown everywhere else in winter

Painted Bunting Passerina ciris

The most improbably coloured bird in North America: a blue head, a green back and a red underside, all on one small finch-like body. The female is a plain soft green and nothing else here is that colour either. Numbers have fallen enough that people are careful about saying where they have seen one.

Where to look dense low brush and feeders, usually glimpsed briefly before it drops out of sight

Best time winter, at feeders and in low brush · Nov–Feb

Tell it apart the male is unmistakable; the female is the only solid GREEN songbird here

Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus

Crow-sized, with a flaming red crest, and the bird Woody Woodpecker was drawn from. It chisels RECTANGULAR holes — sometimes a foot long and deep into the heartwood — following the tunnels of carpenter ants. Once you know the shape of that hole you start finding them all along this canal.

Where to look large cypress and oak, and dead standing timber along the water

Best time any month, in big timber · Year-round

Listen for A loud, ringing, uneven laugh that carries through the woods — wuk-wuk-wuk-wuk-wuk.

Tell it apart CROW-SIZED and black with a tall red crest — nothing else here is remotely as big

Red-bellied Woodpecker Melanerpes carolinus

The commonest woodpecker here and the worst-named bird in Florida: the red belly is a faint wash almost nobody has ever seen in the field. What you actually see is a red cap running back over the nape, and a black-and-white ladder up the back. It calls all day long.

Where to look oak and cypress trunks, dead limbs and feeders

Best time any month, on trunks and at feeders · Year-round

Listen for A rolling, throaty CHURR, and a softer cha-cha-cha — the background sound of an oak hammock.

Tell it apart a red CAP AND NAPE over a zebra-barred back — the red is the top of the head only, never the face

Downy Woodpecker Dryobates pubescens

The smallest woodpecker in North America, and it works the thin outer twigs a heavier bird cannot reach — down to the dry stems of weeds. Black and white, with a red patch on the back of the male’s head. Telling it from the hairy woodpecker comes down to one thing: the bill.

Where to look outer twigs, small branches and weed stems, often travelling with chickadees

Best time any month, out on thin branches · Year-round

Listen for A descending whinny that falls away in pitch; the hairy woodpecker’s rattle stays level.

Tell it apart a TINY bill, far shorter than the head is wide; the hairy’s is as long as its head

Northern Flicker Colaptes auratus

A woodpecker that feeds on the ground, which no other one here does: it eats more ants than any bird in North America and digs in the dirt to get them. Brown and barred, with a black bib, a spotted belly, and a flash of yellow under the wings when it goes up.

Where to look open ground and lawn edges, and dead snags

Best time any month, as often on the ground as on a tree · Oct–Apr

Listen for A loud ringing KEE-yer, and a long rolling wick-a-wick-a-wick-a in spring.

Tell it apart a brown BARRED woodpecker on the GROUND, with a black chest crescent and a white rump in flight

Great Crested Flycatcher Myiarchus crinitus

A big flycatcher of the canopy — grey-breasted, lemon-bellied, rusty-tailed — and you will hear it long before you find it. It nests in a hole, and it habitually weaves a SHED SNAKESKIN into the lining; cavity nesters that do this lose fewer eggs to predators.

Where to look the canopy of oaks and cypress, on a high bare perch

Best time spring and summer, high in the trees · Mar–Aug

Listen for A loud, rising WHEEP! thrown down from the canopy, over and over.

Tell it apart a grey throat and breast against a LEMON belly, with a rusty tail

Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis

A deep blue back over a rusty breast, hunting by dropping onto insects from a low perch rather than chasing them down. It cannot excavate its own hole, so it depends on old woodpecker cavities and on nest boxes — which is the whole reason it recovered from a bad twentieth century.

Where to look fence wires and low posts over mown grass and pasture

Best time any month, on wires and posts over grass · Year-round

Listen for A soft, musical chur-lee, chur-lee — easy to walk straight past.

Tell it apart DEEP BLUE above and rusty below with a white belly; an indigo bunting is blue all over

Loggerhead Shrike Lanius ludovicianus

A songbird that hunts like a hawk without a hawk’s feet. Its legs are too weak to hold prey down, so it IMPALES what it catches on a thorn or a barb of wire and feeds from there, leaving larger kills hanging in a larder. It has declined by about eighty per cent since the 1960s.

Where to look roadside wires, fence posts and barbed wire over open country

Best time any month, on wires over open ground · Year-round

Tell it apart a black robber’s MASK and a hooked bill — a mockingbird has neither, and a thin straight bill

Northern Mockingbird Mimus polyglottos

It sings other birds’ songs, repeating each phrase three or four times before moving on, and an unpaired male will keep it up all night under a streetlight. Grey, with big white wing patches that flash open in flight. It will take on a cat, a dog or a person near its nest, and usually wins.

Where to look rooftops, wires, hedge tops and anywhere with an open song perch

Best time any month, from a high open perch · Year-round

Listen for Phrase after phrase, each repeated three or four times — other birds, car alarms, anything. Often after dark.

Tell it apart plain grey with bold WHITE WING PATCHES flashing in flight, and a long tail

Northern Cardinal Cardinalis cardinalis

Everyone knows the red male with the crest and the black face. Fewer know that the FEMALE SINGS — a full song as elaborate as his, which very few North American songbirds do, and she often sings from the nest. She is a warm buff-brown with red in the crest, wings and tail.

Where to look hedges, thickets and shrubby edges, rarely far from cover

Best time any month, in dense cover · Year-round

Listen for A loud clear slurred whistle — birdy-birdy-birdy, or what-cheer-cheer-cheer — plus a sharp metallic chip.

Tell it apart a pointed CREST and a heavy triangular red bill; a summer tanager has neither

Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata

Loud, blue, crested — and a serious planter of oak trees. Jays carry acorns off and bury them one at a time, and the ones they never come back for become trees; fifty jays were once recorded caching 150,000 acorns in a month. They also imitate a red-shouldered hawk well enough to clear a feeder.

Where to look oaks and wooded edges, gardens and feeders

Best time any month, and noisily · Year-round

Listen for A harsh ringing JAY! JAY! — and a near-perfect red-shouldered hawk scream, which empties a feeder at once.

Tell it apart a blue CREST, a black necklace and white wing spots; a Florida scrub-jay has none of the three

Carolina Wren Thryothorus ludovicianus

A small rusty bird with a white eyebrow and a cocked tail, carrying a voice out of all proportion to it — one of the loudest songs per ounce of any bird here. Pairs hold one territory together all year, and it will nest in a boot, a mailbox or a hanging basket without hesitating.

Where to look brush piles, porches, low tangles and outbuildings

Best time any month, in low tangles · Year-round

Listen for A ringing TEAKETTLE-teakettle-teakettle, astonishingly loud for the size of the bird.

Tell it apart a bold WHITE EYEBROW on a rusty bird holding its tail cocked up

Tufted Titmouse Baeolophus bicolor

A small grey bird with a pointed crest, a black patch above the bill and a peach wash down the flanks. It travels in the mixed winter parties that drift through the oaks with chickadees and a kinglet or two, and it will pull hair from a living animal to line its nest.

Where to look oak and mixed canopy, usually in a small restless party

Best time any month, in oak canopy · Year-round

Listen for A clear whistled PETER-peter-peter, repeated from the canopy.

Tell it apart a grey CREST and a black patch over the bill; a chickadee has a black cap and bib and no crest

Boat-tailed Grackle Quiscalus major

The big glossy blackbird of Florida car parks and boat ramps, and the male’s tail is the mark: very long, and folded down the middle into a deep keel like the hull of a boat. He is iridescent blue-black and struts; she is a plain warm brown and much smaller, which catches people out every time.

Where to look boat ramps, car parks, lake edges and anywhere food gets dropped

Best time any month, near water and people · Year-round

Listen for An unmusical racket of jeers, rattles and rising whistles from the top of a post.

Tell it apart a very long tail folded into a deep V-shaped KEEL; a common grackle’s is shorter and flatter

Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus

The male is jet black with a scarlet shoulder he can cover or flare at will — hidden while he feeds quietly, blazing when he sings from a cattail. The female is not black at all: heavily streaked dark brown, and people take her for an outsized sparrow every single time.

Where to look cattails, marsh edges and wet pasture; flocks on open ground in winter

Best time any month, over marsh · Year-round

Listen for A harsh rising CONK-la-REE from the top of a cattail — the sound of a marsh in spring.

Tell it apart a scarlet-and-yellow SHOULDER on the male; the female is streaky brown, not black at all

Ruby-throated Hummingbird Archilochus colubris

The only hummingbird that breeds in the eastern United States, and it crosses the Gulf of Mexico in a single non-stop flight, roughly doubling its body weight in fat before setting off. Only the MALE carries the ruby throat; the female’s is plain white, and she is the one you will usually be looking at.

Where to look coral bean, firebush, coral honeysuckle and any deep red tubular flower

Best time spring through autumn, at red flowers · Mar–Sep

Listen for A dry chittering, and the hum of the wings — which is how most people notice one at all.

Tell it apart tiny and green-backed; the ruby throat is the MALE only — females and young show plain white

Purple Martin Progne subis

The largest swallow in North America, and east of the Rockies it now nests almost entirely in housing people put up for it — a dependence that began with hollowed gourds hung out by Choctaw and Chickasaw people long before Europeans arrived. The male is glossy blue-black all over.

Where to look over open water and pasture, and around martin houses and gourd racks

Best time spring and early summer, around martin houses · Feb–Jun

Listen for A rich liquid gurgling and chirruping from around the housing.

Tell it apart large for a swallow, and the male is dark ALL OVER — every other swallow here is pale below

Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica

The swallow with the long forked tail streamers — steel-blue above, rusty below — hunting insects low and fast over water and grass. It builds a mud cup on a beam or under a bridge, and it has nested on human structures for so long that a natural site is now the unusual thing.

Where to look low and fast over the canal, lawns and pasture; nesting under docks and bridges

Best time spring through autumn, low over water · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart a deeply FORKED tail with streamers, and a rusty throat; a tree swallow’s tail has only a shallow notch

Cedar Waxwing Bombycilla cedrorum

A sleek fawn-grey bird with a crest, a black mask and a yellow-tipped tail, named for the red waxy droplets on its wing feathers. It lives on fruit, arrives in tight flocks that strip a tree and vanish, and it can get genuinely drunk on berries that have fermented on the branch.

Where to look fruiting trees and shrubs — holly, palm, camphor — in tight flocks

Best time winter and spring, in fruiting trees · Dec–Apr

Listen for A very high, thin, sibilant whistle from a whole flock at once — easy to miss, unmistakable once known.

Tell it apart a pointed crest, a black mask and a YELLOW TIP to the tail, with red wax spots on the wing

Mourning Dove Zenaida macroura

The soft mournful cooing people hear at first light and take for an owl is this bird, not an owl. Slim and fawn-coloured with black spots on the wing and a long pointed tail — and when it leaves in a hurry the wings WHISTLE, a sharp fluttering whine that warns every dove nearby.

Where to look wires, gravel, lawns and feeders, often in pairs

Best time any month, on wires and open ground · Year-round

Listen for A slow, sad coo-OO-oo, oo, oo — mistaken for an owl more often than any other sound here.

Tell it apart a long POINTED tail edged with white, and black spots across the wing

Common Ground-Dove Columbina passerina

North America’s smallest dove, barely bigger than a sparrow, and it walks rather than perches — a small scaly-breasted bird shuffling along a sandy path, easy to step past entirely. When it finally flushes it shows a burst of rufous in the wings and drops down again a few yards on.

Where to look sandy paths, road edges and open bare ground, on foot

Best time any month, on bare sandy ground · Year-round

Listen for A soft, monotonous, rising woot… woot… woot, repeated for minutes on end.

Tell it apart SPARROW-SIZED, with a scaly breast and rufous flashing in the wing when it flies

Carolina Chickadee Poecile carolinensis

A tiny bird with a black cap and bib and clean white cheeks, and it leads the mixed foraging flocks that drift through the oaks in winter — titmice, a kinglet, a warbler or two, all following the chickadees. It caches seeds one at a time and remembers where it put them.

Where to look oak and mixed woodland canopy, in small restless flocks

Best time any month, in the canopy · Year-round

Listen for A fast husky CHICK-a-dee-dee-dee — the more dee notes, the more alarmed the bird.

Tell it apart a black CAP AND BIB with clean white cheeks, and no crest at all

Tree Swallow Tachycineta bicolor

Steel-blue-green above and clean white below, and in winter it gathers over Florida in numbers no other swallow here approaches — thousands wheeling over open water at dusk before pouring down into a marsh roost. It is the one swallow that can live on waxy bayberry fruit when the insects stop.

Where to look over the lakes and marsh in large swirling flocks, especially at dusk

Best time winter, wheeling over open water · Nov–Mar

Tell it apart clean WHITE underparts with no rusty throat, and only a shallow notch in the tail

Eurasian Collared-Dove Streptopelia decaocto

It is on every wire in Florida now, and it arrived by accident: birds escaped from a pet shop in the Bahamas in the 1970s, crossed to the Keys under their own power, and their descendants have since reached the Pacific. Pale sandy-grey, bigger than a mourning dove, with a thin black half-collar.

Take care Invasive

Where to look utility wires, roofs and car parks — almost always near buildings

Best time any month, on wires and roofs · Year-round

Listen for A monotonous three-note koo-KOO-kook, over and over from a wire or a roof ridge.

Tell it apart a thin black HALF-COLLAR on the hindneck, and a square-ended tail

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher Polioptila caerulea

A scrap of a bird, blue-grey and endlessly busy, flicking a long white-edged tail from side to side as it works the outer leaves. Its nest is a tiny cup bound to a branch with SPIDER SILK and shingled over with lichen, so it reads as a knot on the limb rather than a nest.

Where to look the outer twigs and leaves of oaks and cypress, never still

Best time any month, out in the leaves · Feb–Oct

Listen for A thin, wheezy, complaining spee… spee, given constantly as it moves.

Tell it apart blue-grey with a white EYE RING and a long black tail edged white

White-eyed Vireo Vireo griseus

You will hear this one far more often than you see it: it stays down inside dense tangles and throws out a short, explosive, faintly bad-tempered song. Olive-green with two white wing bars and bright YELLOW SPECTACLES round a pale eye — and the eye that names it takes a good look to see.

Where to look dense low thickets, vine tangles and scrubby edges

Best time any month, inside dense tangles · Year-round

Listen for An abrupt, explosive jumble that opens and closes with a sharp chick — chick-per-weeoo-chick.

Tell it apart yellow SPECTACLES round a pale white eye, over two white wing bars

Red-eyed Vireo Vireo olivaceus

The bird that sings all day when everything else has given up — short burred phrases with a pause between each, as though asking a question and then answering it, on through the heat of the afternoon. Olive above, white below, with a grey cap and a bold white eyebrow under a dark line.

Where to look high in the leaves of oaks and hardwoods, moving deliberately

Best time spring and autumn, high in the canopy · Mar–Apr, Sep–Oct

Listen for Short burred phrases with a pause between each, repeated all day — up, then down, question and answer.

Tell it apart a GREY CAP with a white eyebrow under a black line, and no wing bars

Eastern Phoebe Sayornis phoebe

A plain grey-brown flycatcher that sits on a low perch and pumps its tail down and up, over and over — that movement names it before any plumage does. It was also the first bird ever marked by a person: Audubon tied silver thread to one’s leg in 1804 to see whether it would return. It did.

Where to look low twigs, fence wire and dock rails over water, sallying out and back

Best time winter, on low perches near water · Nov–Mar

Listen for A rasping two-note FEE-bee. It says its own name, and not musically.

Tell it apart the constant TAIL-PUMPING, a dark head, and no wing bars or eye ring

House Wren Troglodytes aedon

Small, brown, plain and furious. It winters here in low tangles, usually alone, scolding anything that comes near from somewhere inside a brush pile. Nowhere near as loud as a Carolina wren and a good deal plainer — barely an eyebrow to speak of — though it cocks its tail in exactly the same way.

Where to look brush piles, hedge bottoms and dense low tangles

Best time winter, in brush piles · Nov–Feb

Listen for A dry scolding chatter and a hard churr from deep inside a brush pile.

Tell it apart plain brown with only a FAINT pale eyebrow; a Carolina wren’s is bold white and the bird is rustier

Gray Catbird Dumetella carolinensis

Slate grey all over with a black cap and a chestnut patch under the tail that nobody ever sees. It does mew — a flat, complaining cat’s mew from somewhere inside a thicket, which is how most people meet it. It mimics like its relatives, but strings the phrases together without repeating them.

Where to look dense thickets, hedges and berry tangles, usually out of sight

Best time winter, in thickets · Oct–Mar

Listen for A flat nasal MEW, exactly like a cat, from inside dense cover.

Tell it apart uniform SLATE GREY under a neat black cap; a mockingbird is paler with white wing patches

Brown Thrasher Toxostoma rufum

Rusty above and heavily streaked below, with a long tail and a hard yellow eye, and it thrashes through leaf litter with its bill — which is the name. It has one of the largest song repertoires of any North American bird, well over a thousand song types, delivered in phrases sung twice each.

Where to look leaf litter under dense shrubs, and a high bare twig when it sings

Best time any month, low in cover · Year-round

Listen for Rich musical phrases, each sung TWICE — a mockingbird repeats three or four times, a catbird not at all.

Tell it apart RUSTY above with bold dark streaks below, and a yellow eye

American Robin Turdus migratorius

In Florida this is a winter bird and a flocking one — not the solitary lawn robin of northern gardens but a horde that drops into a fruiting tree, strips it and moves on. Grey-backed with a brick-red breast and a broken white eye ring. They can arrive in hundreds and be gone the same day.

Where to look open lawns, pasture and fruiting trees, usually in numbers

Best time winter, in flocks on lawns and fruiting trees · Dec–Mar

Listen for A caroling cheerily, cheer-up, cheerio, and a hard tut-tut-tut when alarmed.

Tell it apart a brick-RED breast on a grey-backed bird, with a broken white eye ring

Eastern Towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus

A big long-tailed bird that feeds by kicking backwards with both feet at once in the leaf litter, making a noise out of all proportion to itself. Black hood, rusty flanks, white belly. Florida’s resident birds have a PALE eye; a red-eyed towhee here is a northerner down for the winter.

Where to look dense scrub, palmetto edges and the leaf litter underneath

Best time any month, in scrub and leaf litter · Year-round

Listen for A ringing DRINK-your-TEEEEA, the last note a trill, and a sharp rising chewink.

Tell it apart a black hood over rusty flanks; a PALE eye means a Florida resident, a red eye a winter visitor

Common Grackle Quiscalus quiscula

Smaller and slimmer than the boat-tailed grackle, with a bronze-and-purple gloss and a hard pale yellow eye. It walks across open grass with the stiff-shouldered look of a bird in a bad mood, and it sings — if that is the word for it — like a rusty gate being forced open.

Where to look lawns, pasture and car parks, walking in loose flocks

Best time any month, on open grass · Year-round

Listen for A short, harsh, ascending squeak like a rusty hinge, finishing in a metallic shriek.

Tell it apart a bronze-glossed body and a shorter, flatter tail; a boat-tailed grackle is bigger with a deep keeled tail

Brown-headed Cowbird Molothrus ater

It builds no nest at all. The female lays her eggs in other birds’ nests — over two hundred species have been recorded raising one — and the hosts do the work while their own young go short. A glossy black bird with a dull brown head, following cattle for the insects they put up.

Where to look pasture with cattle, open lawns and feeders

Best time any month, with livestock and at feeders · Year-round

Listen for A liquid bubbling glug-glug-GLEEE, oddly sweet for the bird making it.

Tell it apart a dull BROWN HEAD on a glossy black body, with a short conical finch-like bill

American Goldfinch Spinus tristis

Nobody here sees the canary-yellow bird. It moults its body feathers twice a year, and the plumage it wears in Florida is the drab one — olive-tan with black wings and pale bars. It is a strict vegetarian too: a cowbird chick laid in a goldfinch nest starves on the all-seed diet.

Where to look feeders, weedy edges and sweetgum trees, in small twittering flocks

Best time winter, at feeders and in flocks · Dec–Mar

Listen for A bouncing po-ta-to-CHIP, given in time with the dips of its undulating flight.

Tell it apart a stubby CONICAL bill and a notched tail; olive-tan here, not yellow

Pine Warbler Setophaga pinus

The one warbler that will come to a feeder: it eats seeds regularly, which almost no other warbler does, and that is what brings it in among the cardinals during a cold snap. Yellow-breasted with white wing bars, and it lives in pines all year — for once the name is honest.

Where to look pine canopy and trunks, and feeders in cold weather

Best time any month, in pines · Year-round

Listen for A soft musical trill on one pitch — slower and sweeter than a chipping sparrow’s dry rattle.

Tell it apart an unstreaked yellow breast with TWO white wing bars over a plain olive back

Common Yellowthroat Geothlypis trichas

A small skulking warbler of wet edges, and the male wears a broad black BANDIT MASK across a brilliant yellow throat — nothing else here looks remotely like it. He sings from a reed stem and then drops out of sight. The female has the yellow throat and no mask, which is harder work.

Where to look cattails, pickerelweed and dense wet edges, always low down

Best time any month, along marsh edges · Year-round

Listen for A rolling WITCHETY-witchety-witchety from somewhere inside the reeds.

Tell it apart a broad black MASK over a yellow throat on the male; the female is plain with a yellow throat

Black-and-white Warbler Mniotilta varia

Striped black and white from bill to tail, and it behaves like nothing else in its family: it creeps up and around trunks and heavy limbs, head-first and head-down, working the bark crevices the way a nuthatch does. Every other warbler here stays out among the leaves.

Where to look tree trunks and heavy limbs, creeping — not out in the foliage

Best time autumn through spring, on trunks · Sep–Mar

Listen for A thin, high, two-note weesee-weesee-weesee, like a small wheel that wants oiling.

Tell it apart black-and-white STRIPES including a striped crown, and a trunk-creeping habit no other warbler has

Yellow-throated Warbler Setophaga dominica

A crisp black-and-white face with a brilliant yellow throat dropped into the middle of it. It works high in the cypress and the pines, often creeping along a limb rather than flitting between them, and it is here all year — which for a warbler is unusual. It likes Spanish moss.

Where to look high in cypress, pine and mossy limbs, creeping along branches

Best time any month, high in cypress and pine · Year-round

Listen for A series of clear whistled notes running down the scale and lifting again at the very end.

Tell it apart a bright YELLOW THROAT set in a black-and-white face, with a white neck patch

Chipping Sparrow Spizella passerina

A small clean sparrow with a bright rusty cap, a white eyebrow and a black line through the eye, feeding on the ground in loose winter flocks. It famously lined its nest with horsehair back when horses were everywhere; now it makes do with whatever fine fibre it can find.

Where to look short grass, path edges and under feeders, in loose flocks

Best time winter, on open ground · Nov–Mar

Listen for A long dry mechanical trill on one pitch, like a sewing machine running.

Tell it apart a clean RUSTY CAP with a white eyebrow and a black eye-line, over an unstreaked grey breast

Savannah Sparrow Passerculus sandwichensis

A streaky brown sparrow of open grass that runs mouse-like through the stems instead of flying, and flushes only at the last possible moment. The mark worth learning is a small YELLOW patch just in front of the eye — subtle, but nothing else out on that grass has one.

Where to look rough open grass, weedy field edges and pasture

Best time winter, in rough grass · Nov–Feb

Listen for A thin, insect-like tsip-tsip-tseeee-tsaaay, easily lost in the wind.

Tell it apart a streaked breast and a YELLOW LORE in front of the eye, with pink legs

Eastern Meadowlark Sturnella magna

Not a lark at all — it is a blackbird, related to the grackles and the cowbird. From behind it is a streaky brown bird in the grass; the instant it turns it is a brilliant yellow breast with a black V laid across it. It sings from a fence post over open pasture.

Where to look fence posts and wires over open pasture and rough grass

Best time any month, over open pasture · Year-round

Listen for Two or three clear slurred whistles sliding down the scale — pure, carrying, unhurried.

Tell it apart a brilliant YELLOW breast crossed by a black V, and white outer tail feathers flashing in flight

House Finch Haemorhous mexicanus

Every house finch east of the Rockies descends from a few caged birds let go on Long Island in 1940 — sold illegally as "Hollywood finches" and released when the sellers risked prosecution. The male has a red head and breast over a brown, heavily streaked body, and the streaking is the mark.

Where to look feeders, gutters, eaves and shrubbery around houses

Best time any month, around buildings and feeders · Year-round

Listen for A long rambling cheerful warble that finishes on a harsh rising buzz.

Tell it apart red on the head and breast only, over a STREAKED brown body; a cardinal is all red, with a crest

Chimney Swift Chaetura pelagica

A cigar with wings, and it cannot perch at all — its feet only cling, so it spends the whole day airborne and the night clamped to a vertical wall inside a chimney or a hollow tree. It glues its nest to that wall with its own saliva. Numbers have fallen hard as chimneys were capped.

Where to look high over rooftops and open water, never perched

Best time spring through autumn, high overhead · Apr–Sep

Listen for A hard, dry, mechanical chittering overhead — usually heard before the bird is found.

Tell it apart a stiff flickering CIGAR shape with no tail to speak of; swallows glide, and this bird does not

Eastern Kingbird Tyrannus tyrannus

Tyrannus tyrannus, and it earns the name twice over: a bird smaller than a robin that will fly straight up at a crow, a hawk or even an eagle crossing its territory, get above it, and hammer down on its back until it leaves. Black above, white below, with a clean white band across the tail tip.

Where to look wires, fence posts and bare outer twigs over open ground and water

Best time spring and summer, on exposed perches · Apr–Aug

Tell it apart a crisp WHITE BAND across the tip of a black tail

Summer Tanager Piranga rubra

The only entirely red bird in North America, and unlike a cardinal it has no crest and a pale, heavy bill. It is a specialist on bees and wasps: it takes them in flight, beats them dead against a branch and wipes the sting out before swallowing. It will tear a wasp nest open for the grubs.

Where to look the canopy of oaks and pines, often sitting still for long spells

Best time spring and summer, high in the canopy · Mar–Aug

Listen for A dry chuckling pik-i-tuck-i-tuck, quite unlike its rich robin-like song.

Tell it apart solid red with NO CREST and a pale stout bill; a cardinal has a crest and a black face

Indigo Bunting Passerina cyanea

There is no blue pigment anywhere in the bird. The colour comes from microscopic structure in the feathers bending the light, so in poor light the male simply looks black. It migrates at night, and young birds learn the pattern of the stars — proved by putting captive buntings under a planetarium sky.

Where to look weedy field edges, brushy roadsides and thickets

Best time spring and autumn, on weedy edges · Mar–Apr, Oct

Listen for Bright paired notes — sweet-sweet, chew-chew, seet-seet — each phrase given twice over.

Tell it apart blue ALL OVER with no rusty breast; an eastern bluebird is blue above and rusty below

Ruby-crowned Kinglet Corthylio calendula

A tiny olive bird that never stops moving and flicks its wings constantly, which names it from across a clearing. The ruby crown of the name belongs to the male and is normally hidden under grey feathers — it goes up only when he is excited or cross, and most people never see it at all.

Where to look oak and mixed canopy and low scrub, flicking its wings, never still

Best time winter, in restless flocks · Nov–Mar

Listen for A song astonishingly loud for the size — high notes running down into a rich tumbling warble.

Tell it apart a broken white EYE RING and constant WING-FLICKING; the red crown is usually hidden

Red-headed Woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus

The one that really does have a red head — the whole head and neck, a solid crimson hood over a white body and black wings with big white patches. It stores food in bark crevices for the winter, and it is the only woodpecker known to COVER its caches so that nothing else finds them.

Where to look open pine, dead standing timber and burnt edges; not a dense-canopy bird

Best time any month, in open pine and dead timber · Mar–Aug

Listen for A harsh rolling TCHUR, lower and rougher than the red-bellied woodpecker’s churr.

Tell it apart the ENTIRE head crimson, over a clean white belly and big white wing patches

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Sphyrapicus varius

It drills neat rows of shallow holes round a trunk and comes back to drink the sap that wells up, and the insects caught in it. Those wells feed other animals too — other birds, squirrels and insects work the same rows. Look for the tidy horizontal lines of holes long after the bird has moved on.

Where to look trunks of hardwoods and pines, and the rows of holes it leaves behind

Best time winter, on trunks · Nov–Feb

Listen for A slow, irregular, stuttering drum — never the steady rattle of the other woodpeckers — and a cat-like mew.

Tell it apart a long WHITE WING STRIPE down the folded wing, and a red forehead

Hairy Woodpecker Dryobates villosus

The downy woodpecker’s bigger double, and separating them is almost entirely a matter of proportion: this one’s bill is as long as its head is wide, where the downy’s is a stub. It is also markedly scarcer here, works heavier trunks and limbs, and is far shyer of a feeder.

Where to look trunks and big limbs in mature woodland, less often at feeders

Best time any month, on heavy trunks · Oct–Apr

Listen for A sharp emphatic PEEK, and a rattle that holds its pitch — a downy’s whinny falls away.

Tell it apart a bill as LONG as the head is wide, and clean white outer tail feathers without spots

White-winged Dove Zenaida asiatica

A stocky grey dove with a hard-edged white stripe along the closed wing that opens into a broad white flash in flight. It has spread east across Florida over the last few decades. Its song is a four-note cooing phrase that sounds uncannily like a barred owl asking who cooks for you.

Where to look wires, feeders and suburban trees, often alongside mourning doves

Best time any month, on wires and at feeders · Mar–Sep

Listen for A hooting who-cooks-for-YOU — genuinely owl-like, and the reason people report owls in broad daylight.

Tell it apart a hard-edged WHITE STRIPE along the folded wing, a square tail and a blue eye-ring

Rock Pigeon Columba livia

The city pigeon, descended from a Mediterranean cliff bird and brought over by settlers — which is why it nests perfectly happily on a bridge girder or a warehouse ledge, since those are cliffs as far as it is concerned. Centuries of domestication left the flock every colour from white to near-black.

Take care Invasive

Where to look bridges, buildings, car parks and boat ramps — rarely far from a structure

Best time any month, around structures · Year-round

Tell it apart chunky, with a white rump and usually two dark WING BARS; plumage otherwise varies wildly

House Sparrow Passer domesticus

Not a sparrow in the American sense at all — it belongs to an Old World family and is no relation to the native sparrows it feeds beside. Brought over deliberately in the 1850s, it now lives wherever people do, and it will evict a bluebird or a martin from its nest box.

Take care Invasive

Where to look supermarket lots, gutters, eaves and hedges beside buildings

Best time any month, around buildings · Year-round

Listen for A monotonous, cheerful CHEEP… CHEEP… CHEEP from a gutter or a hedge, all day long.

Tell it apart the male has a black BIB and a grey crown; no native sparrow here has either

European Starling Sturnus vulgaris

Every starling in North America descends from about eighty birds released in Central Park in 1890. In winter it is spangled all over with pale spots and carries a dark bill; by spring the spots have worn away and the bill has turned yellow. It mimics — other birds, car alarms, a ringing phone.

Take care Invasive

Where to look lawns, wires, car parks and roofs, walking rather than hopping

Best time any month, on lawns and wires · Year-round

Listen for A jumble of whistles, clicks and rattles with other species’ calls and mechanical noises mixed through it.

Tell it apart SPANGLED with pale spots in winter, a short square tail, and a pointed bill that yellows in spring

Florida Black Bear Ursus americanus floridanus

Florida’s own subspecies, and the largest land animal in the state — a big male runs to four hundred pounds. It came off the state threatened list in 2012 after a long recovery. It is overwhelmingly a vegetarian opportunist: acorns, saw palmetto berries, insects, and whatever anybody left on a porch.

Where to look oak hammock and scrub away from the water; occasionally a suburban edge at night

Best time dusk and dawn, spring and autumn · Mar–Jun, Sep–Nov

Tell it apart solid black with a brown muzzle, no shoulder hump, and a rump higher than the shoulders

Raccoon Procyon lotor

The most dexterous hands of any animal here — the forepaws carry about four times the touch receptors of the hind feet, and a raccoon reads an object by feeling it, often underwater. That is what the "washing" is. The black mask cuts glare and the tail rings break up its outline at night.

Where to look the bank, the dock, bins, and the shallows feeling for crayfish

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Listen for A chittering, churring conversation, and a high tremolo from kits in a den tree.

Tell it apart a black BANDIT MASK and a heavily RINGED tail

Virginia Opossum Didelphis virginiana

North America’s only marsupial, and far better company than it looks. Its blood carries a protein that neutralises snake venom, it eats ticks by the thousand, and it almost never carries rabies — its body temperature sits near 94°F, too cool for the virus. Playing dead is involuntary, a faint rather than a trick.

Where to look the bank, the bins, and along fence lines at night

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a pointed white face, a naked RAT-LIKE tail and fifty teeth — more than any other land mammal here

Nine-banded Armadillo Dasypus novemcinctus

It walked into Florida from Texas within living memory and it is now everywhere, rooting through leaf litter for grubs with its nose down and almost no idea you are there. Every litter is four IDENTICAL young from a single egg. It can carry the leprosy bacterium, so look and do not handle.

Where to look leaf litter, lawn edges and roadsides, digging noisily

Best time dusk and after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a leathery banded SHELL and a long ringed tail; it bolts straight upward when startled

White-tailed Deer Odocoileus virginianus

Florida’s deer are noticeably smaller than northern ones — an adaptation to heat, and the Key deer at the far end of the state are smaller still. The tail is the signal: raised and flared white, it is an alarm to every other deer in sight, which is why you usually see it going away.

Where to look hammock edges, pasture margins and the quiet end of the canal at first light

Best time dawn and dusk, most months · Year-round

Tell it apart a broad WHITE tail flag raised in flight; Florida animals are small for the species

Wild Hog Sus scrofa

Brought by Spanish expeditions in the 1500s, so they have been here longer than almost anything else introduced — and they do more damage than all the rest put together. A sounder roots up ground like a rotavator, wrecking wetland edge and native plants. A big boar carries tusks and a bad temper.

Take care Invasive

Where to look rooted ground and wallows along wet edges; the damage is easier to find than the animal

Best time dusk and after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart ROOTED earth turned over in strips, and a blocky dark animal with a straight tail

Eastern Grey Squirrel Sciurus carolinensis

It buries nuts one at a time and remembers a great many of them, and it will dig a decoy hole and mime burying nothing if it thinks it is being watched. It can turn its hind feet right round to climb down a trunk head-first, which nothing else in the tree can do.

Where to look oak canopy, lawns and every feeder

Best time any month, all day · Year-round

Listen for A scolding, rasping chatter with tail flicks — usually aimed at a cat, a hawk or you.

Tell it apart grey with a fluffy pale-edged tail; the fox squirrel is twice the size and far darker

Sherman’s Fox Squirrel Sciurus niger shermani

Twice the size of a grey squirrel and much stranger to look at: a black face with a white nose and ears, over a body that can be anything from pale buff to charcoal. It spends far more time on the ground, in open pine and oak, and it moves at a lope rather than a scurry.

Where to look open pine and sandhill with big spaced trees — not dense canopy

Best time mornings, any month · Oct–Apr

Tell it apart a BLACK face with a white nose and ears, on a squirrel twice the size of a grey

Southern Flying Squirrel Glaucomys volans

It is probably the commonest squirrel in these woods and almost nobody sees one, because it is strictly nocturnal. It does not fly but glides on a membrane stretched between wrist and ankle, steering with its flattened tail, and can cover well over a hundred feet from a good launch.

Where to look oak and hickory canopy at night; listen at dusk near cavity trees

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Listen for A high, sharp, birdlike chirp from the canopy after dark — easily taken for a bird.

Tell it apart huge black EYES, a flattened tail and a loose fold of skin along the flank

Marsh Rabbit Sylvilagus palustris

A rabbit that swims, and does it well — it will take to open water to escape, paddling with just eyes and nose showing, and it feeds in the shallows. Darker and more compact than a cottontail, with short rounded ears and, crucially, no white on the tail at all.

Where to look marshy edges, wet grass and the bank itself, often close to water

Best time dusk and after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart NO white under the tail, and brownish rather than grey — a cottontail flashes white

Eastern Cottontail Sylvilagus floridanus

The rabbit of dry ground and mown edges, and the one that shows a bright white powder-puff of a tail as it goes. Greyer and longer-eared than the marsh rabbit, with a rusty nape. It freezes first and runs late, which is why you nearly step on one before it moves.

Where to look lawn edges, old fields and dry roadside verges

Best time dawn and dusk, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a bright WHITE cottontail flashing as it runs, and a rusty patch on the nape

Grey Fox Urocyon cinereoargenteus

The only dog in the Americas that climbs trees — it has semi-retractable claws and rotating forearms, and will go up a trunk to hunt or to escape, sometimes denning in a hollow well off the ground. Grizzled grey with rusty flanks and a black stripe down the tail.

Where to look hammock and brushy edges; look up as well as along

Best time dusk and after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a BLACK STRIPE down the top of the tail to a black tip; a red fox has a white tip

Bobcat Lynx rufus

Twice the size of a house cat and built differently — long legs, a short black-tipped tail, and ear tufts. It is here far more often than it is seen: a bobcat will watch a person walk past from ten yards away without moving. Marsh rabbit is its staple on this canal.

Where to look hammock edges, palmetto and dense cover near open ground

Best time dawn and dusk, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a SHORT black-tipped tail, ear tufts and spotted flanks

Coyote Canis latrans

Not native here, and not introduced either — it walked in on its own, reaching every Florida county by the 1990s after the red wolf was removed from the picture. Trying to kill them out makes them breed harder, so they are now permanent. Most of what it eats is rodents, fruit and carrion.

Where to look open edges, pasture and roadsides at night

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Listen for A group of yips and rising howls after dark that sounds like far more animals than it is.

Tell it apart narrow muzzle, tall ears and a bushy tail carried DOWN when running

Striped Skunk Mephitis mephitis

The warning display comes long before the spray: it stamps its front feet, hisses, and turns to raise the tail, and an animal that has to spray has usually been ignored twice already. It can hit a target five yards off. The great horned owl eats them anyway, having almost no sense of smell.

Where to look field edges, roadsides and gardens at night

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart black with a WHITE V from the crown down the back, and a plumed tail

Hispid Cotton Rat Sigmodon hispidus

The animal half the predators in this guide are actually living on — hawk, owl, bobcat and snake alike. It cuts little runways through dense grass, which is the easiest way to know it is there, and it breeds at a rate that keeps up with being eaten from every direction.

Where to look dense grass and weedy edges — look for tunnels at ground level

Best time any month; mostly by its runways · Year-round

Tell it apart a coarse grizzled grey-brown rat with a blunt face and a tail SHORTER than its body

Brazilian Free-tailed Bat Tadarida brasiliensis

The fastest bat in level flight anywhere — over ninety miles an hour has been recorded — and it hunts high, well above the trees, where most bats do not go. The tail sticks out past the membrane, which is the name. A colony under a bridge or in a roof can run to thousands.

Where to look high over open water and lit spaces at dusk; roosts in structures

Best time dusk, warm months especially · Year-round

Tell it apart a TAIL projecting well beyond the membrane, and long narrow wings

Evening Bat Nycticeius humeralis

A small brown bat that comes out early — often before the light has properly gone, which is when most people see their first one. It roosts in tree cavities and under loose bark rather than in caves, and mothers will nurse pups that are not their own, which is rare in bats.

Where to look over the canal and lawn edges at first dusk, low and fluttering

Best time early dusk, warm months · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart small and dark brown with a blunt face and short rounded ears; it flies EARLY

Seminole Bat Lasiurus seminolus

A rich mahogany-red bat that roosts in Spanish moss — it hangs in a clump looking exactly like a dead leaf, which is the whole strategy. It does not use caves or buildings at all. When cold weather comes it simply tucks deeper into the moss rather than going anywhere.

Where to look hanging in Spanish moss by day; over clearings and water at dusk

Best time dusk, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart deep MAHOGANY-RED fur, frosted at the tips, on a solitary bat in moss

Rhesus Macaque Macaca mulatta

Florida has wild monkeys because of a 1930s boat operator at Silver Springs who put six on an island to draw tourists and did not know they could swim. The troop is now in the hundreds and has spread down the Ocklawaha into Lake County — one has been photographed in Mount Dora.

Take care Invasive · Danger

What to do Do not approach, feed or corner one. A bite or scratch is the real risk: some of this population carries herpes B, which is dangerous to people. Back away and give it room.

Where to look river and hammock edges; most likely as a surprise, not a search

Best time daylight, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a stocky brown monkey with a pink face and a short tail, on the ground or low in trees

Southeastern Pocket Gopher Geomys pinetis

You will see the work and not the animal. It lives its whole life underground in dry sand, pushing up neat fans of loose soil every few yards — "salamanders", in the old Florida name, from sand-mounder. The fur-lined cheek pouches it is named for turn inside out to be emptied.

Where to look dry sandhill and open sandy ground — look for fresh fans of loose sand

Best time any month; by its mounds, not by sight · Year-round

Tell it apart fresh FANS of loose sand pushed up in a line; the animal itself is almost never above ground

Florida Mouse Podomys floridanus

The only mammal species found nowhere on Earth but Florida, and it lives in somebody else’s house: it digs its own side chamber off a gopher tortoise burrow and depends on them. Lose the tortoise and you lose this mouse. Large ears, big eyes, and a distinctly rusty wash along the flanks.

Where to look scrub and sandhill, in and around gopher tortoise burrows — not the canal

Best time after dark; rarely seen at all · Year-round

Tell it apart large ears and ORANGE-RUSTY flanks; it has five foot-pads where other mice here have six

Round-tailed Muskrat Neofiber alleni

Florida’s own muskrat, found almost nowhere else, and it builds a dome of woven grass the size of a football out in the marsh with the entrance underwater. The tail is round in cross-section rather than flattened, which is the name and the difference from its northern cousin.

Where to look dense marsh grass — look for a grass dome in standing water

Best time any month; by its houses, not by sight · Year-round

Tell it apart a football-sized DOME of woven grass in the marsh; the animal is small, dark and rarely seen

Scarlet Kingsnake Lampropeltis elapsoides

A harmless snake that has spent a long time pretending to be a coral snake, and it is good at it — red, black and yellow rings and a small size. The order of the rings is the whole difference, and the rhyme is worth knowing before you need it: on this one, red touches BLACK.

Where to look under bark and logs in pine and hammock; rarely out in the open by day

Best time after rain and at night, spring through autumn · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart red bands touching BLACK, and a RED snout; a coral snake has red touching yellow and a black snout

Eastern Hognose Snake Heterodon platirhinos

The best actor in these woods. Cornered, it flattens its neck like a cobra, hisses and strikes with its mouth shut; if that fails it writhes, voids, rolls belly-up and plays dead with its tongue out — and will right itself and flop over again if you turn it back. Harmless throughout.

Where to look dry sandy ground and open pine, hunting toads

Best time daytime, spring and autumn · Mar–May, Sep–Oct

Tell it apart an upturned SHOVEL of a snout, and a neck flattened into a hood when alarmed

Eastern Coachwhip Masticophis flagellum flagellum

The fastest snake here, and built like the whip it is named for: a dark head shading back to a pale braided-looking tail. It hunts by sight with its head held up off the ground, which almost nothing else does. It does not chase or whip people — that is an old story with nothing behind it.

Where to look dry sandhill, scrub and open sandy edges, moving fast

Best time hot days, spring through autumn · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart a DARK head fading to a pale tail that looks like plaited leather

Striped Crayfish Snake Liodytes alleni

A glossy brown snake that eats almost nothing but freshly moulted crayfish, and has the teeth and jaw muscles for exactly that. It lives down in dense water weed and is far more often found than seen — usually under debris at the edge. Harmless, and it rarely even tries to bite.

Where to look dense water weed, water hyacinth mats and marshy edges

Best time after dark and after rain, warm months · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart a glossy dark brown snake with three faint dark STRIPES and a yellowish belly

Sand Skink Plestiodon reynoldsi

It has all but given up being a lizard. The legs are vestigial — two tiny toes in front, one behind — and it "swims" through loose sand below the surface, hunting by feeling vibration. Its tracks are a wavy line on the sand with nothing that made them in sight. Federally threatened.

Where to look ancient dry sand ridges in scrub — a trip, and never the canal bank

Best time any month; by its tracks · Feb–May

Tell it apart a wavy S-shaped TRACK on bare sand; the animal is pale, nearly limbless and underground

Florida Worm Lizard Rhineura floridana

Neither a worm nor a lizard: an amphisbaenian, a separate lineage altogether, and this is the only one in the United States. Pink, ringed, eyeless and legless, it tunnels head-first through sandy soil. People meet it in a flowerbed after heavy rain and file it firmly under earthworm.

Where to look sandy soil and gardens; it surfaces when the ground floods

Best time after heavy rain, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart PINK and ringed like an earthworm, but with a hard shovel-shaped head and scales

Florida Scrub Lizard Sceloporus woodi

Found nowhere on Earth but Florida’s dry sand ridges, and it will not cross a patch of dense vegetation — which is why a road or a housing lot cuts a population in half permanently. A brown lizard with a dark stripe down each side, doing press-ups on an open patch of white sand.

Where to look open white sand in scrub, on the ground or a low stump

Best time sunny days, spring through autumn · Feb–Oct

Tell it apart a brown lizard with a dark BROWN STRIPE along each side, on bare sand

Tropical House Gecko Hemidactylus mabouia

The gecko on the porch light, and it is not from here: an African species that reached Florida through the Caribbean and now owns most lit walls in the state. It has displaced the earlier introduced geckos almost everywhere, and it eats what the light brings in.

Take care Invasive

Where to look walls, porch lights and outbuildings after dark

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Listen for A soft repeated chirp or clicking from a wall after dark.

Tell it apart mottled grey-brown with faint chevrons and a bumpy tail; large eyes with no eyelids

Indo-Pacific Gecko Hemidactylus garnotii

Every one of these is female. The species reproduces by parthenogenesis — clones, no males anywhere — so a single animal arriving in a shipment can found a whole population, which is exactly how it got here. Dark grey-brown by day, almost translucent pale at night, with an orange belly.

Take care Invasive

Where to look walls, porch lights and buildings after dark, often beside the tropical gecko

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart an ORANGE-YELLOW belly, and a flattened tail with a fine serrated edge

Bluegill Lepomis macrochirus

The fish every child on this dock catches first, and the one most of the bass are eating. In late spring the males sweep out saucer-shaped nests in the shallows, dozens side by side in a colony, and guard them fiercely — a bed of them is visible from the bank as pale circles on the bottom.

Where to look shallow weedy edges, dock pilings and around structure

Best time spring and summer, in the shallows · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a solid BLACK ear-flap with no red or pale edge, and a dark blotch on the rear dorsal fin

Redear Sunfish Lepomis microlophus

The shellcracker, and the name is literal — it has crushing plates in its throat and lives largely on snails and small clams, which is why it grows fat where other sunfish do not. It beds earlier than the bluegill, often around the first full moon of spring, and runs noticeably bigger.

Where to look sandy shallows over shell and snail beds, deeper than bluegill

Best time spring, on the beds · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a bright RED or orange edge to the black ear-flap; the bluegill’s flap is plain black

Spotted Sunfish Lepomis punctatus

The stumpknocker, and that is exactly how it feeds — working along submerged logs and cypress knees, picking insects off the wood. Small, tough and everywhere along this canal. Rows of black or red spots run along the flanks, one on every scale, which nothing else here has.

Where to look submerged logs, cypress knees and undercut banks

Best time any month, along wood · Year-round

Tell it apart rows of small dark SPOTS along the flank, one per scale

Warmouth Lepomis gulosus

A sunfish that behaves like a small bass: a huge mouth, an ambush habit, and a bad temper. Mottled brown and olive, with red eyes and three or four dark streaks radiating back from them across the cheek. It holds in the thickest cover it can find and does not travel far.

Where to look stumps, weed beds and undercut banks with deep cover

Best time any month, in heavy cover · Year-round

Tell it apart RED eyes with dark streaks radiating back across the cheek, and a very large mouth

Redbreast Sunfish Lepomis auritus

The river sunfish, and the one with the ridiculous ear-flap — long, narrow, entirely black, and on a big male it can be longer than his eye is wide. The belly is a deep orange-red. It prefers moving water, so the canal itself suits it better than the open lakes do.

Where to look flowing stretches, undercut banks and around current

Best time spring and summer, in moving water · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a very LONG narrow all-black ear-flap, longer than it is deep

Bluespotted Sunfish Enneacanthus gloriosus

A sunfish that stays the size of a large coin, scattered with iridescent blue spangles that catch the light like sequins. It lives deep in weed in quiet backwaters and acid water, and it is almost never caught on a hook — you find it with a dip net or not at all.

Where to look quiet tannic backwaters and dense weed, away from open water

Best time warm months, in dense weed · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart tiny, dark, and spangled with iridescent BLUE spots

Dollar Sunfish Lepomis marginatus

Small, round and about the size of a silver dollar, which is the name. Wavy blue-green lines run across the cheek and gill cover, and the breeding male carries orange spotting over a dark body. It likes slow tannic water with a soft bottom and plenty of overhead cover.

Where to look slow shaded backwaters with soft bottom and cover

Best time warm months, in slow tannic water · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a small round sunfish with WAVY blue lines across the cheek and a short rounded ear-flap

Black Crappie Pomoxis nigromaculatus

Speckled perch — specks — and the winter fish of this chain. When the water cools they school up and move shallow to spawn, and half the boats on Lake Dora in January are after them. A paper-thin mouth that tears easily, which is why so many come off at the side of the boat.

Where to look brush piles, dock pilings and open water in schools

Best time winter and early spring · Nov–Mar

Tell it apart irregular black SPECKLING all over a silvery slab-sided fish, with seven or eight dorsal spines

Sunshine Bass Morone chrysops × Morone saxatilis

A hatchery cross between a white bass and a striped bass, stocked into Florida water because it grows fast and fights hard and cannot establish itself. It chases schools of shad in open water — when gulls start diving over a boil in the middle of the lake, this is usually what is underneath.

Where to look open water over the lake basin, chasing shad schools

Best time cooler months, in open water · Oct–Mar

Tell it apart silvery with broken dark STRIPES along the side, and a deep body — the stripes stagger, not run straight

Florida Gar Lepisosteus platyrhinus

A long torpedo of a fish hanging motionless just under the surface, armoured in interlocking diamond scales so hard that early settlers used them as arrowheads. It gulps air from a lung-like swim bladder, which is how it survives water with no oxygen in it at all. The eggs are toxic.

Where to look hanging still just under the surface in weedy shallows

Best time any month, near the surface · Year-round

Tell it apart dark ROUND SPOTS over the whole body, head included, and a snout shorter than a longnose gar’s

Longnose Gar Lepisosteus osseus

The same ancient armoured design with a beak on the front — the snout is long, narrow and twice the length of the head, lined with needle teeth. It takes fish sideways with a slash of that snout and turns them to swallow head-first. It has been doing this essentially unchanged for a very long time.

Where to look open water and channel edges, often near the surface

Best time warm months, near the surface · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a very LONG narrow beak, twice the length of the head; the Florida gar’s is short and broad

Bowfin Amia ocellata

The mudfish, and a genuine living fossil — the last survivor of a lineage that goes back well past the dinosaurs. It breathes air, survives water nothing else can, and fights harder than anything its size. The male guards the young in a dense black ball that moves as one.

Where to look weed beds, backwaters and stagnant shallows

Best time any month, in thick cover · Year-round

Tell it apart a long undulating DORSAL FIN running most of the back, and a black eyespot at the tail base on the male

Channel Catfish Ictalurus punctatus

The whiskers are the point: a catfish is covered in taste buds — well over a hundred thousand of them, over the whole body, not just the barbels — so it is effectively swimming through a sense of taste. It finds food in water too dark and muddy for any eye to work in.

Where to look deeper channels and holes, feeding at night

Best time after dark, warm months · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a deeply FORKED tail and scattered dark spots on a slender silvery body

White Catfish Ameiurus catus

The middle catfish of this chain — bigger than a bullhead, smaller than a channel cat, and the one that takes a bait fished on the bottom off a dock more often than either. A broad head, a moderately forked tail, and chin barbels that are white rather than dark.

Where to look deeper edges and channel bottoms near structure

Best time warm months, on the bottom · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a MODERATELY forked tail with a broad head, and WHITE chin barbels

Brown Bullhead Ameiurus nebulosus

A small dark catfish of soft muddy bottoms, mottled brown and built like a tadpole. The barbels under the chin are dark, which separates it from the yellow bullhead beside it. It tolerates low oxygen and warm stagnant water that would kill most things, and it will eat nearly anything.

Where to look soft mud bottoms in backwaters and canal edges

Best time after dark, any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a SQUARE-ended tail and DARK chin barbels on a mottled brown fish

Yellow Bullhead Ameiurus natalis

The bullhead that will take a bait in broad daylight when nothing else is moving, and the one children catch off a dock at midday. Yellowish-brown, unmottled, with a rounded tail — and the chin barbels are unmistakably WHITE, which settles it against the brown bullhead every time.

Where to look shallow weedy edges, docks and soft bottoms

Best time any month, day or night · Year-round

Tell it apart WHITE chin barbels and a rounded tail on a plain yellow-brown fish

Chain Pickerel Esox niger

A small pike, and it looks like one: a duckbill snout full of teeth and a green flank overlaid with a dark chain-link pattern. It sits absolutely still in the weed and takes something passing with a lunge nobody sees coming. In cool water it feeds when nothing else will.

Where to look weed edges and lily pads in clear shallow water

Best time cooler months, in weed edges · Nov–Apr

Tell it apart a dark CHAIN-LINK pattern over green flanks, and a duckbill snout

Golden Shiner Notemigonus crysoleucas

The big native minnow of this chain, and the classic Florida bass bait — wild-caught shiners fished under a float account for most of the biggest bass taken here. Deep-bodied, brassy gold, with a sharp keel along the belly behind the pelvic fins that no other minnow here has.

Where to look weedy shallows and lake edges in loose schools

Best time any month, in the shallows · Year-round

Tell it apart a brassy GOLD deep body and a fleshy KEEL along the belly; the lateral line dips sharply

Brook Silverside Labidesthes sicculus

A sliver of glass at the very surface, so transparent you see it by the bright silver stripe along its side and nothing else. It skips clear of the water to escape, and lives barely a year — almost the whole population dies off after spawning and is replaced.

Where to look the top inch of open water, in loose schools on calm evenings

Best time warm months, at the surface · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart nearly TRANSPARENT with a bright silver side-stripe, and a long beak-like snout

Threadfin Shad Dorosoma petenense

The fuel of this chain. Vast schools of them feed every bass, crappie and osprey on the water, and a cold snap can kill them off by the acre — a winter shad kill washing up on a bank is normal, not a pollution event. The last dorsal ray draws out into a long thread.

Where to look open water in dense schools, often dimpling the surface

Best time any month; kills after cold snaps · Year-round

Tell it apart a long THREAD trailing from the last dorsal ray, and a yellowish tail

Gizzard Shad Dorosoma cepedianum

The same shape grown large — big enough that only an adult bass, a gar or an osprey can handle one. It filters plankton through fine gill rakers and grinds it in a muscular gizzard-like stomach, which is the name. The blunt snout overhangs a small mouth set right underneath.

Where to look open water and the lake basin, in schools

Best time any month, in open water · Year-round

Tell it apart a BLUNT overhanging snout with the mouth underneath, and a dark shoulder spot

Seminole Killifish Fundulus seminolis

A stout killifish found only in Florida, hanging in small groups over clean sand in the shallows. The male carries rows of dark dashes along the flank; the female is plainer and barred. It is a common live bait here, and one of the fish a wading heron is actually stabbing at.

Where to look sandy shallows and shorelines, in small groups near the surface

Best time warm months, over clean sand · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart rows of dark DASHES along a stout pale flank, on a blunt-headed surface fish

Golden Topminnow Fundulus chrysotus

A small fish that lives in the top inch of still water, with an upturned mouth built to take insects off the surface film. The male is scattered with glittering gold flecks and crimson spots when he is in condition. It never goes deep, so a dip net at the edge is how you meet it.

Where to look still weedy margins and backwaters, right at the surface

Best time warm months, at the surface · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a flattened head with an UPTURNED mouth, and gold flecking over the flank

Least Killifish Heterandria formosa

Among the smallest fish in North America — a mature female is about the size of a fingernail and a male smaller still. It bears live young rather than laying eggs, and does it a few at a time over weeks rather than all at once, which almost nothing else does.

Where to look dense weed and vegetation right at the edge, in still shallow water

Best time warm months, in dense weed · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart FINGERNAIL-sized, olive, with a dark side-stripe and a dark spot on the dorsal fin

Eastern Mosquitofish Gambusia holbrooki

The small fish in every ditch, puddle and pond edge in Florida, bearing live young and eating mosquito larvae — which got it shipped around the world as a control measure, where it has generally become a pest instead. The female is much larger than the male and carries a dark belly patch.

Where to look every shallow edge, ditch and puddle — the commonest fish here

Best time any month, in shallow edges · Year-round

Tell it apart a small pale fish with an UPTURNED mouth; the female has a dark pregnancy patch

Sailfin Molly Poecilia latipinna

The male carries a dorsal fin like a raised sail, far out of proportion to him, and displays it side-on to females and rivals. It grazes algae off surfaces and can live in water from fresh to fully salt. In poor oxygen it skims the very top film, where the water meets the air.

Where to look shallow weedy edges and brackish reaches, grazing surfaces

Best time warm months, in shallow edges · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a huge SAIL of a dorsal fin on the male; rows of spots along a stout olive body

Lake Chubsucker Erimyzon sucetta

A quiet bottom fish with a small downturned sucker mouth, working over soft sediment for tiny invertebrates. Young ones carry a bold black stripe from snout to tail that fades with age into a pattern of dark blotches. It needs clear vegetated water and drops out where that goes.

Where to look clear weedy shallows with soft bottom, near the bed

Best time warm months, over soft bottom · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a small DOWNTURNED sucker mouth; young fish carry a bold dark side-stripe

American Eel Anguilla rostrata

Every eel in this canal was born in the Sargasso Sea, drifted here as a transparent leaf-shaped larva, and will go back there once to spawn and die. Nobody has ever seen them spawn. They can cross wet grass overland between waters, which is how they turn up in ponds with no inlet.

Where to look under banks, in debris and mud; moving at night

Best time after dark, warm months · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a long snake-like body with a continuous fin around the tail, and a small lower jaw jutting forward

Blue Tilapia Oreochromis aureus

An African cichlid, in Florida since the 1960s, and now in most of this chain. It digs crater-shaped nests in the shallows and defends them, and the female broods the eggs in her mouth. Great mats of them spawning in spring make the bottom look pitted with craters.

Take care Invasive

Where to look shallow sandy flats — look for a field of round craters on the bottom

Best time spring and summer, on the nests · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart round CRATER nests dug in the shallows; a deep-bodied grey fish with a red-edged tail

Suckermouth Armored Catfish Pterygoplichthys spp.

The aquarium plec, released and thriving — armour-plated, with a rasping sucker mouth for grazing algae off anything hard. It tunnels nest burrows into the bank, which collapses them, and it is the animal behind a lot of undercut shoreline on this chain. Almost nothing native will eat it.

Take care Invasive

Where to look grazing hard surfaces; nest burrows drilled into soft banks

Best time any month; burrows visible in the bank · Year-round

Tell it apart bony ARMOUR plates over the whole body and a flat rasping sucker mouth underneath

Grass Carp Ctenopharyngodon idella

A large Asian carp stocked on purpose to eat hydrilla, and every one released in Florida is a sterile triploid — checked individually before stocking, so they cannot breed. A big one browses weed like a cow. Where they have been stocked heavily the submerged plants can vanish altogether.

Where to look over submerged weed beds in the lakes; permitted stockings only

Best time warm months, browsing weed beds · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a very large torpedo-shaped carp with BIG scales and no barbels at all

Common Green Darner Anax junius

One of the few dragonflies that migrates, and it does it in generations — the ones that leave in autumn are not the ones that come back. A green thorax, a blue abdomen on the male, and a bullseye mark on the forehead. It hawks insects on the wing and can take them out of the air behind it.

Where to look patrolling back and forth over the canal and lawn edges

Best time warm months, over open water · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a green thorax over a BLUE abdomen, with a dark bullseye on the forehead

Blue Dasher Pachydiplax longipennis

The commonest dragonfly on this dock, and the one that lets you get closest — it perches on a stem with its wings angled down and forward and simply watches you. The male dusts over powder blue with age; the face is metallic green and the eyes turquoise. It obelisks in heat, pointing its abdomen at the sun.

Where to look perched on stems and rails at the water’s edge, returning to the same spot

Best time warm months, all day · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a powder-BLUE abdomen with a metallic green face, and dark patches at the wing bases

Eastern Pondhawk Erythemis simplicicollis

A dragonfly that eats other dragonflies, including its own kind, and will take prey nearly its own size. The female and young male are bright grass green with black bands; the mature male turns entirely chalky blue, so the two look like different species sitting side by side.

Where to look perched flat on the ground, docks and bare surfaces near water

Best time warm months, all day · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart female bright GRASS GREEN with black bands; mature male entirely chalky blue

Halloween Pennant Celithemis eponina

Amber wings banded in brown, and it perches at the very tip of a grass stem and flaps in the wind like a flag — which is the name. In a breeze it flutters rather than flies, more like a butterfly than a dragonfly, and it hunts well away from water in open grass.

Where to look the tips of tall grass stems in open ground, flapping in the wind

Best time summer, in open grass · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart AMBER wings crossed by brown bands, held out flat while it swings on a stem tip

Great Blue Skimmer Libellula vibrans

The largest skimmer in North America, and it likes shade — a wooded seep or a shaded ditch rather than open water, which is unusual. The mature male is a soft powdery blue with a white face and startling blue-grey eyes. It perches horizontally on a twig and returns to it.

Where to look shaded seeps, wooded ditches and canal edges under cover

Best time summer, in shaded water · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart very large and powdery blue with a WHITE face and blue-grey eyes

Four-spotted Pennant Brachymesia gravida

Black-bodied, with a single conspicuous white spot on the leading edge of each of the four wings — four spots, and they are what you see from a distance as it hangs on a stem tip over open water. The male darkens to near-black with age and the wingtips smoke over.

Where to look stem tips and bare twigs over open water, often in numbers

Best time summer, over open water · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart FOUR white spots, one on the front edge of each wing, on a dark body

Needham’s Skimmer Libellula needhami

A warm orange dragonfly of marsh edges, with amber running along the leading edge of each wing and a thin dark line down the top of the abdomen. It is close enough to the golden-winged skimmer that the two are regularly confused; this is the one on this kind of still, weedy water.

Where to look weedy still water and marsh edges, perched on emergent stems

Best time summer, at marsh edges · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart ORANGE body and legs with amber along the front edge of the wings

Carolina Saddlebags Tramea carolina

It glides more than it flaps, and the dark patches at the base of the hindwings look exactly like a pair of saddlebags on a bird seen from below. The body is deep red. It can stay airborne for long stretches without a wingbeat, riding warm air over open ground.

Where to look gliding over open water, lawns and clearings, rarely perching

Best time warm months, gliding overhead · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart dark SADDLEBAG patches at the base of the hindwings, on a red-bodied glider

Eastern Amberwing Perithemis tenera

One of the smallest dragonflies in North America, barely an inch long, with wings of solid amber. It mimics a wasp — it pumps its abdomen up and down and waggles it while perched, which is what a wasp does and what a dragonfly does not, and predators leave it alone.

Where to look low stems and twigs right at the water’s edge

Best time warm months, at the water’s edge · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart TINY, with entirely amber wings, and it waggles its abdomen like a wasp

Rambur’s Forktail Ischnura ramburii

A damselfly so slender it reads as a flying needle, holding its wings closed above its back where a dragonfly holds them out flat. The male has a green thorax and a blue tail-light at the tip. Some females mimic the male’s colours exactly, apparently to be left alone by them.

Where to look low in weed and grass at the water’s edge, flying weakly

Best time warm months, low in vegetation · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart wings held CLOSED over the back, a needle-thin body, and a blue tip to the tail

Citrine Forktail Ischnura hastata

The smallest damselfly in North America, and orange-yellow rather than blue — unusual for a forktail. It is also the only dragonfly or damselfly known to reproduce without males anywhere: the population in the Azores is entirely female and clonal, though the Florida ones do it the ordinary way.

Where to look short grass and low weed near water, very low down

Best time warm months, in short vegetation · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart TINY and orange-yellow, with the wing stigma set back from the wingtip

Zebra Longwing Heliconius charithonia

Florida’s state butterfly since 1996, and the only butterfly known to eat pollen as well as nectar — which is why it lives about six months instead of a few weeks. Dozens roost together on the same twig every night and return to it. The flight is slow, floating and unmistakable.

Where to look shaded hammock edges and passionvine tangles, flying slowly

Best time any month, in shaded edges · Year-round

Tell it apart long narrow black wings striped in pale YELLOW, on a slow floating flight

Gulf Fritillary Dione vanillae

Bright orange above and, underneath, a row of long silver streaks like spilled mercury that you only see when it closes its wings. Its caterpillars eat passionvine and nothing else. It migrates in numbers down the Florida peninsula in autumn, sometimes in a steady stream.

Where to look open sunny ground, passionvine and flower beds

Best time any month; heaviest in autumn · Year-round

Tell it apart elongated SILVER streaks on the underside of the hindwing, over bright orange above

Monarch Danaus plexippus

The famous migration is only half the story here: Florida also holds monarchs that never migrate at all and breed through the winter, which is why you can see one in January. The caterpillar takes up milkweed toxins and the adult keeps them, and its colours advertise the fact.

Where to look milkweed, open sunny ground and flower beds

Best time any month; heaviest in autumn · Year-round

Tell it apart ORANGE with heavy black veins and a black border with two rows of white dots

Queen Danaus gilippus

The monarch’s darker cousin, and in Florida it is often the commoner of the two. Deep chestnut-brown rather than orange, with white dots scattered across the forewing and much finer black veining. It uses the same milkweeds and carries the same defence.

Where to look milkweed patches, open sunny ground and roadsides

Best time warm months, on milkweed and flowers · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart deep CHESTNUT-brown with white dots on the forewing and faint veins — not heavy black ones

Viceroy Limenitis archippus floridensis

For a century this was taught as the textbook harmless copycat of the monarch. It is not: the viceroy is unpalatable in its own right, so the two are honest partners in the same warning signal rather than one cheating. The Florida form is dark, and copies the queen rather than the monarch.

Where to look willow and wet edges — closer to water than a monarch usually is

Best time warm months, near willows · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a black line crossing the hindwing veins, which no monarch or queen has

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Papilio glaucus

A big yellow butterfly striped like a tiger, sailing along the treeline. The females come in two forms: one yellow like the male, one entirely black, and the black one is a copy of the poisonous pipevine swallowtail. Both forms can come out of the same brood.

Where to look treelines, flower beds and damp patches on paths

Best time spring through autumn, along treelines · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart YELLOW with four black tiger stripes down the forewing; the dark female shows them as shadows

Giant Swallowtail Heraclides cresphontes

The largest butterfly in North America, and its caterpillar is a masterpiece — it looks exactly like a fresh bird dropping, and when prodded it everts a forked orange gland that smells strongly of citrus. It lives on citrus leaves, which is why growers call it the orange dog.

Where to look citrus, hammock edges and open sunny ground

Best time warm months, in citrus and open ground · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart dark brown crossed by a broad band of YELLOW spots forming an X on the forewing

Palamedes Swallowtail Papilio palamedes

The swamp swallowtail, and it is tied to red bay and sweetbay — which puts it in trouble, because laurel wilt has been killing red bays across Florida since 2002. Where the bays go, this butterfly follows. Black with a broad yellow band and a yellow stripe under the hindwing.

Where to look swamp, bayhead and shaded wet woods with bay trees

Best time warm months, in swamp and bayhead · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a single unbroken YELLOW stripe along the underside of the hindwing

Black Swallowtail Papilio polyxenes asterius

The one that eats the parsley, dill and fennel in a garden, and the caterpillar is worth finding: green, banded black and yellow, and it throws out a forked orange horn behind its head that smells sharply of rancid herbs when you disturb it. The male carries a broad yellow band.

Where to look carrot-family plants, gardens, fennel and open sunny ground

Best time warm months, in gardens and open ground · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart black with a band of yellow spots and an ORANGE eyespot with a black pupil at the hindwing corner

Zebra Swallowtail Eurytides marcellus

Striped black and white with the longest tails of any swallowtail here, trailing behind it like streamers. Its caterpillars eat pawpaw and nothing else, so you find it where pawpaw grows. Spring-brood adults are smaller and paler than the summer ones, which throws people.

Where to look pawpaw thickets and open woodland edges, flying fast and low

Best time spring and summer, near pawpaw · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart triangular wings striped BLACK AND WHITE, with very long trailing tails

Spicebush Swallowtail Papilio troilus

The caterpillar is the reason to look: it has two huge false eyespots on a swollen front end and it rests in a folded leaf, so what looks out at you is a small green snake. The adult is black with a blue-green wash across the hindwing and a double row of pale spots.

Where to look shaded woodland with red bay and sassafras

Best time warm months, in shaded woods · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a blue-green WASH across the hindwing, and an extra orange spot where the black swallowtail has none

Cloudless Sulphur Phoebis sennae

A big plain lemon-yellow butterfly that never seems to stop — it flies fast, high and straight, and in autumn streams of them move south down the peninsula. It almost never opens its wings at rest, so the underside with its faint pink-rimmed spots is what you get to see.

Where to look open sunny ground, hedges and flower beds, flying fast and straight

Best time any month; heaviest in autumn · Year-round

Tell it apart plain LEMON yellow with no black margin, and a fast direct flight

Sleepy Orange Eurema nicippe

Deep orange above with a ragged black border, and a dull brick-red underside that turns much darker in the winter brood — so the same species looks different in January. The name comes from a small dark dash on the forewing that somebody once decided looked like a closed eye.

Where to look open sunny ground, roadsides and sennas

Best time any month, on open ground · Year-round

Tell it apart deep ORANGE above with a ragged black border; the winter form is much darker beneath

Barred Yellow Eurema daira

A small yellow butterfly that flies low and weakly over open grass, and the seasonal difference is the striking thing: summer adults are pale beneath, winter ones are a deep rusty brick. The male carries a black bar along the inner edge of the forewing, which is the name.

Where to look short grass, roadsides and open sandy ground, flying low

Best time any month, low over grass · Year-round

Tell it apart small and yellow, with a black BAR along the inner edge of the male’s forewing

Great Southern White Ascia monuste

A white butterfly with turquoise-tipped antennae — an oddly beautiful detail on an otherwise plain insect, and the quickest way to name it. It migrates along the coast in large numbers, and the females come in two forms, one white and one smoky grey-brown.

Where to look open sunny ground, coastal edges and gardens

Best time warm months, in open ground · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart TURQUOISE tips to the antennae on a white butterfly with a dark zigzag wing edge

White Peacock Anartia jatrophae

A pale butterfly of wet open ground, patterned in faint tan and grey with two dark eyespots on each wing and a scalloped orange edge. It holds a small territory on a damp path and returns to the same patch after chasing something off. Very much a Florida insect.

Where to look damp paths, ditch edges and wet open ground

Best time any month, on damp open ground · Year-round

Tell it apart PALE whitish-grey with dark eyespots and a scalloped orange-brown border

Common Buckeye Junonia coenia

Six eyespots, two of them big enough to startle a small bird into hesitating, which is the entire point — a bird that pecks at a wing mark leaves the butterfly alive. It basks flat on bare ground with its wings spread and flies low and fast when disturbed.

Where to look bare paths, roadsides and open sandy ground, basking flat

Best time any month, on bare open ground · Year-round

Tell it apart two large EYESPOTS on each forewing over a white bar and two orange bars

Red Admiral Vanessa atalanta

Dark wings crossed by a single bold orange band, and a butterfly with a reputation for boldness — it will land on a person, and males hold a sunny patch in the afternoon and fly at anything that enters it, including birds. Its caterpillars live on nettles, folded into a leaf tent.

Where to look sunny clearings, paths and nettle patches; often on the ground

Best time any month, in sunny clearings · Year-round

Tell it apart a bold ORANGE-RED band slashing across a dark forewing, and white spots at the tip

Phaon Crescent Phyciodes phaon

A small orange-and-black butterfly of damp open ground, and the mark that names it is a pale CREAM band across the middle of the forewing where its close relatives have orange. Its caterpillars eat fogfruit, a low creeping plant of lawn edges and damp paths.

Where to look damp lawn edges, paths and ditch margins, flying low

Best time any month, on damp ground · Year-round

Tell it apart a pale CREAM band across the middle of the forewing, not orange

Ceraunus Blue Hemiargus ceraunus

A butterfly the size of a thumbnail, powder blue above on the male and grey-brown beneath, with a black eyespot at the corner of the hindwing. It flies a few inches off the ground over open sand and legumes, and shuts its wings the instant it lands.

Where to look open sandy ground, roadsides and low legumes

Best time any month, low over open ground · Year-round

Tell it apart THUMBNAIL-sized; grey beneath with a black spot at the hindwing corner, powder blue above

Gray Hairstreak Strymon melinus

At rest it rubs its hindwings together so the little tails and the orange eyespot beside them wave about — a false head, and birds peck at the wrong end. Plenty of them carry a neat bite out of that corner, which is the trick having worked exactly as intended.

Where to look flower heads, open ground and roadsides

Best time any month, on flowers · Year-round

Tell it apart slate GREY beneath with a white-edged black line, an orange spot and thread-thin tails

Long-tailed Skipper Urbanus proteus

A skipper with long tails and an iridescent blue-green body and wing bases — much more striking than a skipper has any right to be. The caterpillar is the bean leafroller, which folds a bean leaf into a tube and lives inside it, and gardeners here know it well.

Where to look beans, legumes, gardens and sunny edges

Best time warm months, in gardens and edges · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart iridescent BLUE-GREEN on the body and wing bases, with long tails

Fiery Skipper Hylephila phyleus

The small orange skipper bouncing over every lawn in Florida, and the one whose caterpillars eat the grass — it is a minor turf pest and a major nectar visitor at the same time. It perches with the forewings and hindwings at different angles, which skippers do and butterflies do not.

Where to look lawns, flower beds and grassy edges, flying in bursts

Best time any month, over lawns · Year-round

Tell it apart small and ORANGE with scattered dark spots beneath, and very short antennae with hooked tips

Luna Moth Actias luna

A pale green moth the size of a hand with long twisted tails, and it has no mouth at all — the adult cannot eat, lives about a week, and spends it doing nothing but finding a mate. The tails spin as it flies and scramble a bat’s echolocation, which is what they are for.

Where to look around lights at night near hardwood; sweetgum and hickory

Best time spring and summer nights · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart huge and pale GREEN with long twisted tails and a transparent eyespot on each wing

Imperial Moth Eacles imperialis

A big yellow moth blotched with purple-brown, and the amount of blotching varies so much that two on the same porch light can look unrelated. Like the luna it does not feed as an adult. The caterpillar is enormous, hairy and comes in green or brown, and feeds on pine and hardwood.

Where to look around lights at night near pine and hardwood

Best time summer nights · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart large and YELLOW blotched with purple-brown, with a stout furry body

Tersa Sphinx Xylophanes tersa

Built like a fighter jet — a sharply pointed abdomen and narrow swept wings — and it hovers at flowers after dark like a hummingbird, feeding on the wing with a long tongue. At rest by day on a trunk it is a streamlined wedge of pale brown and almost invisible.

Where to look hovering at tubular flowers after dark; resting on trunks by day

Best time warm nights, at flowers · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a sharply POINTED abdomen and narrow swept-back wings, hovering at flowers

Oleander Moth Syntomeida epilais

A day-flying moth pretending to be a wasp: iridescent blue-black spotted with white, with a bright red tip to the abdomen, drifting slowly around oleander in full sunlight. Its orange caterpillars strip oleander bushes, and both stages carry the plant’s toxins.

Where to look oleander bushes and plantings, flying slowly in daylight

Best time warm months, by day around oleander · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart iridescent BLUE-BLACK with white spots and a RED tip to the abdomen, flying by day

Island Apple Snail Pomacea maculata

The big introduced apple snail, and the pink egg clusters above the waterline on stems and walls are its signature — the native snail lays pale, and far fewer. It grows too large for a young limpkin or snail kite to handle, so it both feeds and starves them depending on size.

Take care Invasive

Where to look stems, dock pilings and walls just above the waterline

Best time any month; eggs in the warm months · Year-round

Tell it apart a bright PINK cluster of eggs above the water; the native apple snail’s are pale and larger-grained

Asian Clam Corbicula fluminea

Small, pale and ridged, and in some stretches the bottom is paved with them. It arrived in North America in the 1930s, spreads as microscopic juveniles in moving water, and blocks intake pipes in numbers that cost utilities a fortune. Empty shells make up most of the "sand" on some banks.

Take care Invasive

Where to look shallow sandy bottoms and the shell drift along banks

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a small pale triangular shell with strong evenly spaced RIDGES, often in drifts

Everglades Crayfish Procambarus alleni

The blue crayfish of Florida, and a proper blue in mature males rather than a hint of one. It burrows down to the water table in the dry season and plugs the hole with a chimney of mud pellets, waiting for rain. Half the herons, limpkins and watersnakes here are eating them.

Where to look shallow weedy water, and mud chimneys on the bank in dry spells

Best time any month; burrows in dry spells · Year-round

Tell it apart a vivid BLUE crayfish in mature males, and mud-pellet chimneys where it has burrowed

Grass Shrimp Palaemon paludosus

A transparent freshwater shrimp barely more than an inch long, and so clear you see its gut and its black eyes and little else. Thousands live in the weed beds, and they are what a great many small fish are actually eating. Sweep a net through pickerelweed and you will have some.

Where to look dense submerged weed and the roots of floating plants

Best time any month, in weed beds · Year-round

Tell it apart a fully TRANSPARENT shrimp with visible black eyes, about an inch long

Golden Silk Orbweaver Trichonephila clavipes

The banana spider, and the web across the trail in September is hers — a metre or more across, spun in silk that really is gold in the light and strong enough to have been woven into cloth. The male beside her is a fraction of her size. She is not dangerous.

Where to look across trails and gaps between trees, at head height

Best time late summer and autumn · Jun–Oct

Tell it apart a large yellow-and-silver spider with TUFTS of black hair on the legs, in a golden web

Spiny Orbweaver Gasteracantha cancriformis

The crab-like spider in a small web by the porch: a hard white or yellow shell studded with six red spines, looking more like a piece of costume jewellery than an animal. It adds tufts of silk along the web anchor lines, apparently so birds see the web and do not fly through it.

Where to look small webs between shrubs, eaves and porch corners

Best time autumn especially; any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a hard flattened WHITE or yellow shell with six red SPINES around the edge

Green Lynx Spider Peucetia viridans

A bright green spider that hunts on flowers rather than building a web, leaping on whatever lands. She guards her egg sac fiercely and can SPIT venom several inches at a face that gets too close — which is unusual, and not dangerous, but startling when it happens.

Where to look on flower heads and shrub tips, motionless and waiting

Best time late summer and autumn · Jul–Oct

Tell it apart BRIGHT GREEN with long spiny translucent legs, sitting openly on a flower

Regal Jumping Spider Phidippus regius

The largest jumping spider in eastern North America, and the one that turns to look at you — jumping spiders have genuinely good eyesight and will track a moving finger. The male is black with white markings; the female is grey or orange. It stalks like a cat and pounces.

Where to look walls, fences, palmetto and sunny surfaces, hunting actively

Best time warm months, in daylight · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a stocky spider with two huge forward-facing EYES that follows your movement

Carolina Mantis Stagmomantis carolina

The native mantis here, smaller and stockier than the introduced Chinese one, with wings that stop short of the end of the female’s abdomen. It is the only insect that can turn its head to look behind it, and it has a single ear in the middle of its chest, tuned to bat calls.

Where to look on shrubs, flower heads and grass stems, motionless

Best time late summer and autumn · Jul–Oct

Tell it apart a mantis whose wings reach only about two-thirds down the female’s abdomen

Two-striped Walkingstick Anisomorpha buprestoides

Usually seen as a pair, the small male riding on the much larger female for days on end. It is the one insect here that can genuinely hurt you: a pair of glands behind the head fire a terpene spray a foot or more, accurately, at a face — and in an eye it is severe.

Take care Danger

What to do Do not pick one up or bring your face near it. It sprays an irritant chemical over a foot, aimed at eyes, and a hit causes intense pain and temporary blindness. If it reaches an eye, flush with water at once and get medical help.

Where to look low vegetation, palmetto and tree trunks, often in pairs

Best time warm months, on low vegetation · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a brown stick insect with two pale STRIPES down the back, almost always in a mated pair

Eastern Lubber Grasshopper Romalea microptera

Enormous, slow and completely unbothered, because it does not need to hurry — it is toxic, advertises the fact in yellow and red, and hisses and froths a foul foam when handled. Birds that eat one are sick and remember. The young are jet black with a red stripe and look like a different insect.

Where to look open ground, lawn edges and low plants, walking rather than flying

Best time warm months, on the ground and low plants · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart very large and slow, YELLOW and black with short red wings that cannot carry it

Eastern Hercules Beetle Dynastes tityus

The heaviest beetle in the United States, and the male carries a pair of horns half his own length which he uses to lever rival males off a branch. The wing covers are pale olive flecked with black, and they darken if the beetle gets damp — the same animal changes colour with humidity.

Where to look around lights at night; larvae in rotting hardwood

Best time summer nights · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart huge, pale olive flecked black, with a long pincer-like HORN on the male’s thorax

Palmetto Tortoise Beetle Hemisphaerota cyanea

A small domed metallic-blue beetle on saw palmetto, and its defence is extraordinary: each foot carries around ten thousand fine bristles, each wetted with oil, and it clamps down so hard that a predator would need to pull with about sixty times the beetle’s own weight to shift it.

Where to look saw palmetto fronds — almost nowhere else

Best time warm months, on saw palmetto · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a small domed metallic BLUE beetle sitting on a palmetto frond

Florida Carpenter Ant Camponotus floridanus

The big red-and-black ant running along a rail at dusk. It does not eat wood — it hollows galleries in wood that is already soft and damp, which is why finding one indoors means finding a leak. It has no sting, but it bites and then sprays formic acid into the wound.

Where to look rails, trunks and walls after dark; galleries in damp softwood

Best time any month, mostly at dusk and after dark · Year-round

Tell it apart a large ant with a RUSTY-ORANGE front half and a black abdomen, running in the open

Palmetto Bug Periplaneta americana

The big brown one that flies at the porch light, and Floridians call it a palmetto bug because that sounds better. It is not really a house insect here — it lives outdoors in palmetto, mulch and tree holes, and comes in by accident. It can run at about fifty body lengths a second.

Where to look mulch, palmetto boots, tree holes and drains; porch lights at night

Best time any month; worst in warm damp weather · Year-round

Tell it apart large reddish-brown with a pale yellowish ring around the shield behind the head

Firefly Photuris fairchildi

The flashes over the grass on a June evening are a conversation, and some of it is a lie. The female of this genus copies the answering flash of a different firefly species to lure in its males and eat them — and by eating them she takes on the toxins she cannot make herself.

Where to look over damp grass and along wood edges at dusk and after dark

Best time late spring and summer evenings · May–Jul

Tell it apart a slim soft beetle with a shield over its head and a pale glowing tail segment

Lyric Cicada Neotibicen lyricen

The sound of a Florida afternoon in August, coming from high in a tree you will never find it in. Florida’s cicadas are annual ones, not the famous thirteen-year broods, so there is a chorus every summer. The song is made by buckling a pair of ribbed plates thousands of times a second.

Where to look high in the canopy of oaks and pines — heard far more than seen

Best time summer afternoons, by ear · May–Aug

Tell it apart heard, not seen: a long even buzzing drone that swells and fades from the canopy

Green Tree Frog Hyla cinerea

The frog on the window at night, drawn there by the insects the light brings. Bright leaf-green with a crisp white stripe down each side, long-legged and about two inches of it. It is also called the rain frog, because it starts calling when it feels a shower coming — often hours before anything falls.

Where to look window screens, porch walls, lily pads and reed stems

Best time after dark, especially warm humid nights · Apr–Sep

Listen for A loud nasal “queenk, queenk, queenk” repeated all evening, hundreds at once from the marsh edge.

Tell it apart bright green with a clean white stripe along each side; the squirrel treefrog has no stripe, or a broken one

Squirrel Tree Frog Hyla squirella

The chameleon of the porch: it shifts from bright green to yellow-brown to plain brown within minutes, which is why nobody can agree what colour it is. Small, smooth and entirely unremarkable in markings, and that blankness is how you name it.

Where to look porch walls, plant pots, gutters and low foliage

Best time after dark, and before rain at any hour · Apr–Sep

Listen for A scolding, raspy chatter that really does sound like a squirrel telling you off — given away from water, usually just before rain.

Tell it apart small and plain — no clean white side-stripe and no crisp markings; and it changes colour

Barking Treefrog Hyla gratiosa

The largest treefrog native to the United States, and built like one: stout, granular-skinned, and marked with dark round spots on green. It calls from high in a tree or while floating in the water, and the name is the noise — a hollow, doglike bark carrying across a pond at night.

Where to look high in trees near ponds, and floating in the shallows when calling

Best time warm nights in the breeding season · Apr–Aug

Listen for A single deep “doonk” repeated, or a harsher barking from up a tree; carried a long way on a still night.

Tell it apart big and stout with dark round spots on a green back, and noticeably bumpy skin

Pinewoods Treefrog Hyla femoralis

Grey-brown and easy to overlook, and then it opens its mouth and gives itself away completely: the call is a dry irregular rattle that everyone who has heard it describes the same way, as Morse code being tapped out from the pines. Its own field mark is hidden — orange-yellow spots on the hidden surface of the thigh.

Where to look pine flatwoods and trees near temporary ponds

Best time warm wet nights, from the pines · May–Aug

Listen for A dry, uneven series of clicks — dots and dashes, tapped out from the pine canopy after rain.

Tell it apart grey-brown and blotched, with hidden orange-yellow spots on the back of the thigh

Cuban Tree Frog Osteopilus septentrionalis

Much the biggest treefrog you will see here, warty-skinned, with toe pads the size of its eyes — and it should not be here at all. It eats at least five of Florida’s native treefrogs, its tadpoles crowd theirs out, and it gets into plumbing and electrical boxes. Where it settles, the green and squirrel treefrogs thin out.

Take care Invasive · Danger

What to do Don’t pick one up bare-handed — the skin secretion burns and itches for up to an hour, and it is worse in eyes or a mouth. Handled one by accident? Wash your hands before touching your face, and keep pets off it.

Where to look walls, downpipes, birdbaths and anywhere damp near a building

Best time warm nights, on lit walls · Mar–Oct

Listen for A grating, squelching squawk — less musical than any native, often from a downpipe or a wall.

Tell it apart very large for a treefrog, warty, with huge toe pads and skin that looks loose over the head

Pig Frog Lithobates grylio

The grunt you hear across the water at night is almost certainly this, not a bullfrog. It is a big green-grey frog with a sharply pointed nose and fully webbed hind feet — the webbing runs right to the tip of the longest toe, which the bullfrog’s does not. Florida’s frog-leg frog, and much the commoner of the two here.

Where to look floating among lilies and duckweed with just the head showing

Best time after dark, from spring into autumn · Apr–Sep

Listen for A deep, grunting croak exactly like a pig, given from among the lily pads after dark.

Tell it apart pointed snout, huge eardrum, and webbing reaching the tip of the longest hind toe

American Bullfrog Lithobates catesbeianus

The largest frog in North America, and here it is at the very edge of its range — its native limit runs through central Florida, so Lake County is about as far south as it gets. Which matters for a simple reason: the deep voice across the canal at night is far more likely to be a pig frog. If you do meet one, the webbing stops short of the longest toe.

Where to look weedy shallows and pond edges rather than open canal

Best time warm nights, in the quieter backwaters · May–Jul

Listen for A low “jug-o-rum” that carries a long way — but hear a grunt rather than a bellow and you have a pig frog.

Tell it apart no ridges down the back, and hind webbing that stops short of the longest toe — the pig frog’s reaches the tip

Southern Leopard Frog Lithobates sphenocephalus

Slim, long-legged and scattered with dark spots on green or brown, with a pale ridge running down each side of the back. It is the frog that leaps out from underfoot at the water’s edge and lands three feet away, and it is out in cooler weather than most of the others.

Where to look wet grass and the margins of ditches, ponds and the canal

Best time evenings and mild nights, much of the year · Feb–May, Sep–Nov

Listen for A low chuckling trill, widely described as the sound of rubbing a wet hand on an inflated balloon.

Tell it apart dark spots on a pale ridge-lined back, a pointed snout, and a pale spot in the centre of the eardrum

Gopher Frog Lithobates capito

A stocky, warty, heavily spotted frog that lives underground in somebody else’s house: it shelters in gopher tortoise burrows, which is where the name comes from and why its fortunes follow the tortoise’s. Both are in decline for the same reason, and losing the burrows takes the frog with them.

Where to look gopher tortoise burrows in dry sandhills, and the temporary ponds nearby

Best time rainy nights in the breeding season · Mar, Jul–Aug

Listen for A deep snore, like someone asleep in the next room, from a temporary pond on a rainy night.

Tell it apart stocky and warty with heavy dark spotting and prominent ridges down the back; it sits low and looks squat

Southern Toad Anaxyrus terrestris

The toad under the porch light, and the one to be able to name, because the other toad here is dangerous. Look between the eyes: this one has two raised ridges running back to a pair of pronounced knobs. The cane toad has neither — the space between its eyes is smooth, and its poison gland is a big triangle rather than a small oval.

Where to look lawns, paths and porches, anywhere a light draws insects

Best time after dark, under any outside light · Mar–Sep

Listen for A high, musical trill lasting several seconds, from puddles and ditches after rain.

Tell it apart two ridges between the eyes ending in raised KNOBS, and a small oval gland behind the eye

Oak Toad Anaxyrus quercicus

The smallest toad in North America — an adult sits comfortably on a thumbnail, at most an inch and a bit — with a pale stripe down the middle of the back. It is active in the day as well as at night, which no other toad here really is, and a chorus of them sounds nothing like toads at all.

Where to look sandy pine and oak ground, and the puddles in it

Best time warm days and nights after summer rain · May–Sep

Listen for A high, piping “peep” repeated over and over — a pondful sounds like a box of day-old chicks.

Tell it apart tiny, with a clear pale stripe down the spine — nothing else here is this small and striped

Eastern Narrow-mouthed Toad Gastrophryne carolinensis

Not really a toad, and shaped like nothing else here: a smooth plump teardrop with a tiny pointed head and a fold of loose skin across the back of it. The head is narrow because it eats ants, and the fold is a wiper — it draws it forward over the eyes to clear off the ones that fight back.

Where to look under boards, leaf litter and wet grass near shallow water

Best time after heavy rain, usually at night · May–Sep

Listen for A flat, nasal bleat like a lamb, or a buzzer held down for a second or two, from wet grass after rain.

Tell it apart a smooth pointed teardrop with a fold of skin behind the head, and no visible eardrum

Eastern Spadefoot Scaphiopus holbrookii

Most of the year it is underground and there is nothing to see. Each hind foot carries a hard black sickle — the spade — and it digs backwards out of sight and waits, sometimes for months. Then a heavy summer storm brings the whole population up at once, and the ditches fill overnight with a frog nobody knew was there.

Where to look sandy ground; the temporary pools that appear after a storm

Best time the night of a heavy summer downpour, and seldom otherwise · Jun–Sep

Listen for A low grating groan, like a young crow, in an explosive chorus the night a big storm breaks.

Tell it apart vertical cat-like pupils, a hard black spade on each hind foot, and smoother skin than a true toad

Florida Cricket Frog Acris gryllus dorsalis

Barely an inch long, warty, and impossible to catch: disturb one at the edge and it goes across the water in a series of skipping jumps and vanishes. The sound is the giveaway and it is everywhere along the canal, all year — once you can place it you will realise you have been hearing it the whole time.

Where to look mud and matted vegetation right at the waterline

Best time all day and all year, at the water’s edge · Feb–Nov

Listen for A dry metallic “click-click-click” exactly like two pebbles tapped together, speeding up as it goes.

Tell it apart tiny and warty with a dark triangle between the eyes, and a stripe down the back in our Florida form

Little Grass Frog Pseudacris ocularis

The smallest frog in North America. A big one is eighteen millimetres, which is two-thirds of an inch, and it is a slender pinkish-tan thing with a dark stripe running through the eye and along the side. You will hear it long before you ever see one, and most people never do.

Where to look damp grass and sedge at the edges of shallow water

Best time day and night, most of the year · Feb–Oct

Listen for A thin, insect-like “tink” repeated quickly — so high that many adults cannot hear it at all.

Tell it apart minute and slender, with a dark line through the eye continuing down the flank

Greenhouse Frog Eleutherodactylus planirostris

A small brown frog from Cuba and the Bahamas that arrived in potted plants and now lives in every flowerbed in Florida. It has given up water entirely: there is no tadpole, no pond, no chorus at the edge — the eggs are laid in damp leaf litter and tiny fully formed froglets hatch straight out of them.

Take care Invasive

Where to look leaf litter, mulch, flowerbeds and under pots

Best time after dark and after rain · Apr–Oct

Listen for A soft, birdlike chirping from the flowerbed after dark or after rain — easily mistaken for an insect.

Tell it apart small, brown, and either mottled or with two pale back stripes; found in dry leaf litter well away from water

Greater Siren Siren lacertina

An eel that is a salamander. It reaches three feet, keeps feathery external gills its whole life, has two small front legs and NO back ones at all, and lives in the mud of the canal. When the water goes, it burrows down and seals itself in a cocoon of its own dried skin — and can wait there, years if it has to, for the rain.

Where to look the mud and weed of the canal bottom — genuinely there, rarely seen

Best time after dark, in shallow weedy water · Apr–Sep

Listen for Mostly silent; a surprising yelp or a clicking if one is handled.

Tell it apart eel-shaped with feathery gills behind the head, two tiny front legs and no hind legs whatsoever

Two-toed Amphiuma Amphiuma means

A salamander three feet long with four legs so reduced you have to look for them — each is about a centimetre, with two toes on the end. It hunts the canal mud at night, and it is the eastern mud snake’s whole reason for living: that snake specialises in eating this animal. Left alone it wants nothing to do with you; handled, it bites hard and the wound goes bad.

Where to look soft mud and weed beds; sometimes crossing wet ground on a rainy night

Best time after dark, in the shallows · Apr–Sep

Listen for Generally silent; a faint whistle or click when disturbed.

Tell it apart eel-like and slate grey-brown with NO gills showing, and four minute legs with two toes each

Peninsula Newt Notophthalmus viridescens piaropicola

Florida’s own dark newt, and a departure from its northern relatives: where those wear bright red spots, this one has none at all — greenish-brown to nearly black, heavily peppered with fine black speckles over a deep orange belly. It swims in weedy ponds and ditches with a flattened tail, and it does not hurry.

Where to look weedy ponds, ditches and quiet backwaters among the plants

Best time any month, in still weedy water · Feb–May, Sep–Nov

Tell it apart a small dark speckled newt with a flattened swimming tail and a deep orange underside; no red spots

Black Racer Coluber constrictor priapus

The snake you are most likely to meet away from the water, and it will be leaving. Slate-black above, pale grey beneath, with a white chin and a bright, watchful eye — it hunts by sight rather than smell, which is why it holds its head up off the ground. Fast, nervous and completely harmless.

Where to look lawn edges, mulch beds and the base of hedges — usually a black streak going away from you

Best time warm mornings and afternoons · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart glossy black with a white chin and a round pupil; it flees rather than coils

Yellow Rat Snake Pantherophis quadrivittatus

Mustard-yellow with four thin dark stripes running the length of it, and much more likely to be met vertically than horizontally: the belly scales are angled at the edges, which turns a tree trunk into a staircase. It is the snake in the rafters, the one that eats the rats, and it is harmless.

Where to look up oak trunks, in outbuildings, along rafters and fence lines

Best time warm days, and after dark in high summer · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart yellow to olive with four thin dark stripes head to tail, and a habit of climbing

Corn Snake Pantherophis guttatus

Orange and rust, with big red-brown saddles outlined in black and a spearhead pointing forward between the eyes. It is among the most placid snakes in Florida and one of the most useful — a rodent specialist that hunts barns and woodpiles. People keep them as pets the world over; here it simply lives in the yard.

Where to look woodpiles, outbuildings and mulch, mostly after dark

Best time warm evenings and nights · May–Sep

Tell it apart orange with black-edged red saddles, and a spear-point mark on top of the head

Eastern Garter Snake Thamnophis sirtalis

Three pale stripes down a dark body, and a life lived in the damp — lawn edges, ditch banks, anywhere frogs and earthworms are. Florida’s are often washed with blue between the stripes. It is harmless, though it will flatten and smell terrible if you pick it up, which is its whole argument.

Where to look damp lawn edges, ditches and the margins of wet ground

Best time mornings, especially after rain · Mar–May, Sep–Oct

Tell it apart three pale stripes on a stout dark body, and black lips — the ribbon snake is slimmer, with white lips and a white spot before the eye

Peninsula Ribbon Snake Thamnophis sauritus sackenii

A garter snake drawn thin. It is built long and narrow with a tail that is a third of it, and it lives right at the water’s edge, hunting frogs and small fish and swimming when it has to. Quick, nervous, and quite harmless.

Where to look marshy margins, wet grass and the reedy edges of the canal

Best time warm mornings at the water’s edge · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart much slimmer than a garter snake, with white lips and a white spot just in front of the eye

Southern Ringneck Snake Diadophis punctatus punctatus

A pencil of a snake, slate-grey above with a narrow pale collar, and it carries a secret underneath: the belly is orange-yellow, and when something frightens it, it coils the tail into a tight upright spiral to flash that colour. It is a warning flag borrowed from snakes that can back it up. This one cannot, and is harmless.

Where to look under boards, logs, mulch and pots — found by lifting rather than looking

Best time after rain; mostly under things at other times · Mar–May, Sep–Oct

Tell it apart tiny and slate-grey with a pale neck ring, and an orange belly it shows by curling its tail

Rough Green Snake Opheodrys aestivus

Bright leaf-green above and cream below, and almost impossible to see: it hunts in the middle of a shrub, moving slowly through the twigs and picking off caterpillars and spiders. It is one of very few snakes that eats mostly insects, and it is so gentle it is easier to lift off a branch than to make it bite.

Where to look low in shrubs and vines over the bank, usually motionless

Best time warm days, in the green · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart slender and bright leaf-green, up in foliage rather than on the ground — the Florida green watersnake is far heavier, olive rather than green, and stays in the water

Eastern Mud Snake Farancia abacura

Glossy blue-black on top and barred red and black underneath, and it spends its life in the mud after one very specific meal: the amphiuma, an eel-shaped salamander two or three feet long that lives in the same swamps. Cornered, a mud snake rolls over to flash the red belly and presses its pointed tail-tip against you — harmlessly, whatever the old stories say.

Where to look mucky shallows, swamp edges and the wet ground between them

Best time warm wet nights · May–Aug

Tell it apart glossy black above with bold red-and-black bars across the belly, and a hard pointed tail tip

Eastern Indigo Snake Drymarchon couperi

The longest native snake in the United States — well past eight feet — and one of the calmest. It is glossy blue-black all over, hunts in daylight, and eats other snakes, rattlesnakes included, being unbothered by their venom. In winter it shelters in gopher tortoise burrows, which is why saving the tortoise is how you save this.

Take care Protected

What to do Federally threatened: watch, do not approach, and never disturb a tortoise burrow — it is this snake’s winter shelter.

Where to look dry sandhills near tortoise burrows — a genuinely rare sighting here

Best time bright winter and spring days · Feb–Mar

Tell it apart enormous, uniformly glossy blue-black, often with a red-orange chin; it moves in the open by day

Green Anole Anolis carolinensis

Our only native anole, and it has been pushed upwards. The male signals by flaring a pink throat fan and doing press-ups; he can also shift from green to brown, which is mood and temperature rather than camouflage. Since the brown anole arrived, green anoles have moved up into the branches — and in fifteen years their toe pads measurably grew to grip the thinner twigs.

Where to look higher up — shrubs, tree trunks, railings and screens

Best time warm days, on anything vertical · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart green (or brown) with a long thin tail and a PINK throat fan; the brown anole’s is orange-red with a pale stripe

Brown Anole Anolis sagrei

From Cuba and the Bahamas by way of the Florida Keys in 1887, and now in very nearly every county in the state. It keeps low — ground, kerbs, the bottom of walls — and it eats young green anoles, which is why the natives went up the trees. The throat fan is orange-red with a pale border, and it is out constantly.

Take care Invasive

Where to look low down: paths, kerbs, wall bases, pot rims

Best time any warm day, all day · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart brown with a ridged back and pale diamond or stripe pattern, and an ORANGE-red throat fan; it stays low

Southeastern Five-lined Skink Plestiodon inexpectatus

A glossy brown lizard with five pale stripes from nose to tail, and a tail that starts out electric blue and fades as it grows. The blue is a decoy: a predator grabs the bright end, the tail comes away, and the skink walks off. It is the skink you will meet on a woodpile.

Where to look woodpiles, fallen logs and the sunny side of sheds

Best time warm mornings, on sun-warmed wood · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart five pale stripes on a glossy body, about eight inches; the broad-headed skink is far bigger and an adult male has an orange head

Broad-headed Skink Plestiodon laticeps

Florida’s largest skink, and the big males are unmistakable in spring: olive-brown and thirteen inches long, with the whole head swollen and flushed bright orange. They are tree lizards more than ground ones — look up the trunk of a big oak rather than down at the leaf litter.

Where to look up oak trunks and on big fallen limbs

Best time spring mornings, when the males are in colour · Apr–Jun

Tell it apart large and heavy, an adult male with a wide, bright orange head; the five-lined skink is half the size and striped

Ground Skink Scincella lateralis

The smallest lizard you will see here, three to five inches of polished brown with a dark line down each side, and it does not climb anything. It swims through leaf litter instead, with a rustle you hear more often than you see it, and it has a clear window in its lower eyelid so it can keep watch with its eyes shut.

Where to look leaf litter and mulch at the wood’s edge — heard as a rustle, seen as a flick

Best time warm days, in the shade · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart tiny, smooth and coppery-brown with a dark stripe along each side, and short legs it barely uses

Six-lined Racerunner Aspidoscelis sexlineata

Six pale lines down a dark brown back, and a lizard that has decided the answer to everything is speed — clocked at eighteen miles an hour, which on open sand is a blur rather than an animal. It hunts in the full heat of the day when everything else is in the shade, and it never stops moving.

Where to look dry sandy ground, path edges and scrub in full sun

Best time hot middays, on open sand · Apr–Aug

Tell it apart six crisp pale lines on dark brown, a whip tail, and continuous fast movement

Eastern Glass Lizard Ophisaurus ventralis

A lizard that looks exactly like a snake and is not one. It has no legs, but it has eyelids that blink and ear openings behind the jaw, which no snake has. The name is the other half: seized, it thrashes and the tail shatters off in pieces, leaving the predator with the wrong end. More than half of a whole one is tail.

Where to look grassy edges and sandy open ground; often found by mowing

Best time warm mornings, and after rain · Apr–Jun

Tell it apart legless but with blinking EYELIDS and visible ear holes, a stiff body and a groove along each side

Mediterranean House Gecko Hemidactylus turcicus

The pale, bug-eyed, soft-looking gecko on the porch wall after dark, mottled with dark spots and translucent enough to be faintly pink. It is not native to anywhere near here — it came from around the Mediterranean — and it has worked out the one thing that matters: a lit wall is a conveyor belt of moths.

Take care Invasive

Where to look porch walls, window screens and around outside lights

Best time after dark, wherever a light is on · Apr–Oct

Tell it apart pale pinkish-grey with dark mottling and bumpy skin, vertical pupils, and toes that hold onto glass

Florida Banded Watersnake Nerodia fasciata pictiventris

The snake you will actually see. Dark crossbands on a reddish-brown or grey body, a dark line from eye to jaw. Cornered it flattens, hisses and may bite — and has no venom to bite you with. Three things separate it from the cottonmouth: a round pupil, a head barely wider than the neck, no pit between eye and nostril.

Where to look dock pilings and sunny shoreline brush, or swimming with just its head up

Best time warm afternoons · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart a round pupil, a narrow head and no facial pit — and it slips into the water rather than standing its ground

Brown Watersnake Nerodia taxispilota

A heavy brown snake with square dark blotches and a head wider than its neck — which is why it is mistaken for a cottonmouth, and killed for the resemblance. It basks on branches out over the water and drops in with a splash as a boat goes under. Harmless, and a serious fish-eater.

Where to look on branches and snags overhanging the water

Best time sunny middays · Apr–Aug

Tell it apart square blotches, a round pupil, and the drop-and-vanish exit — a cottonmouth swims with its head high and its whole body on the surface

Florida Green Watersnake Nerodia floridana

The largest watersnake in North America — the record is over six feet — and one of the hardest to get a look at. Plain olive-green with no bands at all, it keeps to weedy shallows and marsh edges and is gone into the vegetation before you have finished deciding what it was. Harmless.

Where to look weedy shallows and marsh edges among the lilies

Best time warm mornings · May–Aug

Tell it apart plain olive-green with no bands or blotches, a round pupil and a narrow head

Largemouth Bass Micropterus salmoides

The Harris Chain is trophy-bass water, and Lake Dora by name: it is one of the two lakes where state biologists surgically tagged largemouth over eight pounds to follow where the big ones actually go. Bluegill and black crappie school in the clear shallows around them.

Where to look clear shallows off the dock, and along the deep hydrilla edges

Best time dawn & dusk · Nov–Apr

Apple Snail Pomacea paludosa

A golf-ball of a snail that the canal quietly turns on: it is the main food of the limpkin and of the endangered snail kite, and neither bird has much of a fallback. She lays her eggs above the waterline, in pale pink clusters stuck to a stem — out of reach of every fish that would eat them.

Where to look on emergent stems and bulrush right at the water’s edge

Best time warm months · Jun–Aug

Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus

Bald eagles build the largest nests of any bird on Earth, and the record is Florida’s: a pair near St Petersburg raised one nine feet across and twenty deep, reckoned at over two tons when it was measured in 1963. Ours nest through the cool season, back to front from their northern cousins.

Take care Protected

What to do Protected under federal law: keep well back from a nest tree and never disturb a roosting or nesting bird.

Where to look tall pines and bare snags above the treeline

Best time mornings · Nov–Mar

Listen for Not the piercing scream from the movies — that is a red-tailed hawk, dubbed over very nearly every hawk and eagle on screen. A real bald eagle gives surprisingly weak, high piping whistles.

Tell it apart a white head and white tail on a dark body, with broad wings held almost flat

Osprey Pandion haliaetus

The only bird of prey that goes right into the water after a fish, sometimes vanishing under it altogether. Its outer toe swivels backwards to take hold of something built not to be held, and it turns the catch head-first in the air — a fish carried nose-on cuts the drag the whole way home.

Where to look circling high over open water, then a sudden plunge

Best time mid-morning · Dec–Apr

Listen for A rising and falling series of sharp whistles — the Cornell Lab likens it to a kettle taken quickly off the stove. This, not the eagle, is the loud whistler over the water.

Tell it apart white underneath with a bold dark stripe through the eye; the wings kink into an M seen from below

Great Egret Ardea alba

The bird on the National Audubon Society’s own emblem, and there for a reason: the plume hunters very nearly finished it, and stopping them is how the society began. It hunts by standing still, then stalking slower than anything else in the shallows — and grows the very plumes it was hunted for, down its back, to breed.

Where to look stalking the open shallows, slower than anything else out there

Best time mornings and late afternoon · Year-round

Listen for A low, dry croak of complaint when something puts it up off the bank.

Tell it apart the largest white wader here, with a heavy yellow bill and all-black legs and feet

Snowy Egret Egretta thula

Golden slippers on black legs, and they are working equipment: it shuffles those bright yellow feet through the mud to panic prey into moving, then takes it. Its lacy plumes were nearly hunted out for ladies’ hats a century ago; the fight to stop that helped launch the Audubon movement.

Where to look wading the muddy edges where the bank meets the water

Best time early mornings · Mar–May

Tell it apart much smaller, with a slim black bill and black legs — and bright golden-yellow feet

Cattle Egret Bubulcus ibis

The white egret that is never at the water. Its ancestors crossed the Atlantic from Africa on their own wings, reaching South America about 1877; the species turned up in Florida in 1941, nested here by 1953, and went on to take the continent, following livestock and mowers for the insects they stir up.

Where to look pastures, roadsides and freshly cut lawns — rarely at the canal

Best time mid-morning, behind the mowers · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart short, stocky and hunch-necked, with a yellow bill and dark legs — and it feeds on dry ground, away from water

Little Blue Heron Egretta caerulea

The only heron here that changes colour with age — white as a youngster, slate-blue as an adult, a patchy “calico” in between. The white year seems to work as a passport: snowy egrets chase off adult little blues but let the white youngsters feed among them, and a youngster catches more fish in that company than alone.

Take care Protected

What to do State-designated Threatened in Florida: watch from a distance and never disturb a nesting colony.

Where to look quiet, vegetated edges, hunting slow and deliberate

Best time mornings · Year-round

Tell it apart young birds are white with greenish-yellow legs and a pale blue-grey bill tipped black; adults are slate-blue

Wood Stork Mycteria americana

Florida’s only native stork fishes entirely by touch: it wades with its bill held open underwater and snaps it shut the instant a fish brushes the inside. Listed as endangered in 1984 with the population down by three quarters, it came off the federal list altogether in March 2026 — recovered.

Take care Protected

What to do Off the federal list since March 2026 — that is the good news — and still protected under Florida law while the state reviews where it now belongs: give feeding birds their space and let them work the shallows.

Where to look wading shrinking pools where falling water traps the fish

Best time dry-season shallows · Nov–Mar

Listen for Almost nothing. Adults are voiceless — capable only of a hiss — and “talk” by clattering those big bills like castanets. Only the nestlings make a racket.

Tell it apart much bigger and heavier, with a bald dark scaly head and a thick drooping bill

White Ibis Eudocimus albus

A flock works the mud entirely by feel, the curved red bill closing on a crayfish it never sees. All white on the ground — the jet-black wingtips stay hidden until the whole flock goes up at once.

Where to look flocks working the shallows, the shoreline grass and the open lawns

Best time all day · Sep–Apr

Listen for An unmusical, harsh, nasal honk, usually from a flock passing overhead.

Tell it apart a long, down-curved red bill and red legs; black wingtips flash in flight

Glossy Ibis Plegadis falcinellus

A shadow at a distance; catch it in good light and it turns to bronze, copper and green. It probes the flooded margins in small flocks, with the same down-curved bill as the white ibis. Another self-made immigrant — it crossed from the Old World under its own power, and was here by 1817.

Where to look flooded margins and wet grass, usually in small flocks

Best time mornings, in good light · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart the same down-curved bill as the white ibis, but dark — iridescent bronze and green in good light

Great Blue Heron Ardea herodias

A hinge in the sixth bone of the neck lets it fold the whole neck into a spring and fire the bill forward from it. Its eyes carry enough rods to hunt in the dark, so daylight is only half of its working day.

Where to look standing statue-still in the shallows along the bank

Best time dawn & dusk · Year-round

Listen for A hoarse, prehistoric “frawnk” of complaint as it lifts off the bank — Cornell times the call at about twenty seconds, and it can feel longer.

Tell it apart the biggest of them — grey-blue, a heavy yellowish bill, a black plume over the eye, and it flies with its neck folded back

Tricolored Heron Egretta tricolor

A restless, acrobatic hunter that dashes, pirouettes, and rakes the bottom with one foot to panic the minnows into moving. Fish are ninety per cent and more of everything it eats — there is no fallback.

Take care Protected

What to do State-designated Threatened in Florida: watch from a distance and never disturb a nesting colony.

Where to look dancing through the shallow edges after small fish

Best time mornings · Mar–Oct

Listen for Usually quiet; a short guttural bark when something flushes it off the bank.

Tell it apart the only dark heron here with a clean white belly, and a white stripe down the neck

Florida Sandhill Crane Antigone canadensis pratensis

Florida has its own crane: a subspecies that never migrates. A pair holds the same ground for years and walks the lawns as though they own them, which they rather do — and in late winter, migrants down from the north swell the numbers. The chicks are called colts, and walk with their parents from the first day.

Take care Protected

What to do Never feed them — it is against Florida law, and a fed crane learns to walk up to strangers and into roads. Give a pair with a colt plenty of room; they will defend it.

Where to look open lawns, pasture and marsh edges — usually a pair, often with a colt

Best time mornings and evenings · Oct–Apr

Listen for A rolling, rattling bugle that carries better than a mile, resonated by a windpipe coiled into the breastbone.

Tell it apart grey with a red crown, and it flies with its neck straight out — a heron folds its neck back into an S

Black-crowned Night Heron Nycticorax nycticorax

It spends the day hunched and silent in a shady tree, looking like a bird with nowhere to be, and comes down to the water at dusk to do its fishing. Its scientific name means “night raven”, and that is exactly what it sounds like going over in the dark.

Where to look roosting in cypress and willow by day, at the water’s edge after sundown

Best time dusk and after dark · Mar–Aug

Listen for A flat, barking “quok” from overhead after dark — usually the only sign it is there at all.

Tell it apart a black crown and back over pale grey, a short thick bill, and a red eye

Yellow-crowned Night Heron Nyctanassa violacea

A crayfish specialist, and the bill is the proof: short, deep and heavy enough to crack a shell open. Grey overall, with a boldly striped black-and-white face under the pale crown it is named for. Rather more willing to work in daylight than its cousin.

Where to look the wooded margins and roadside ditches, hunting crayfish

Best time dusk, and often through the day · Apr–Aug

Listen for A short “quawk”, higher and less harsh than the black-crowned’s.

Tell it apart a striped black-and-white face under a pale crown, and longer legs than the black-crowned

Green Heron Butorides virescens

One of the very few birds on Earth that fishes with bait. It drops a twig, a feather or an insect onto the water and waits for the fish that comes to look — and it does not just find the twig, it trims it to length first, which makes it a tool-maker, not only a tool-user.

Where to look crouched low on a branch or root over shady water

Best time dawn & dusk · May–Aug

Listen for A single explosive “skeow” as it bursts off the bank — unmistakable once you have heard it.

Tell it apart small and crouched, with a dark green back and a rich chestnut neck

Least Bittern Ixobrychus exilis

The smallest heron in the Americas, and it has stopped bothering to wade: it straddles two cattail stems and climbs through the reeds instead, which lets it fish water far too deep for its legs. Alarmed, it points its bill straight up and becomes one more vertical stem. Present far more often than seen.

Where to look deep in the cattails and reed beds — listen rather than look

Best time dawn and dusk in the growing season · May–Aug

Listen for A soft, low, dovelike “coo-coo-coo” from somewhere inside the reeds.

Tell it apart tiny and buff with big pale wing patches, and it clings to reed stems instead of standing in the water

Anhinga Anhinga anhinga

The “snakebird”, swimming with nothing but its neck above water. Its feathers are not waterproof, and that is the point — soaked, it stops floating and can hunt underwater — but it pays for the trick afterwards, perched with its wings held open until it has dried out.

Where to look perched wings-out on snags and dock rails, drying off

Best time sunny middays · Year-round

Listen for A loud clicking near the nest that the Cornell Lab likens to a treadle sewing machine, or a croaking frog with a sore throat.

Tell it apart a straight dagger bill and a long fanned tail; it swims with only the snaky neck showing, and perches with wings spread to dry

Double-crested Cormorant Nannopterum auritum

The anhinga’s double, and the reason half the “anhingas” people point at are not. It swims low with its back awash, chases fish down with its feet, and dries off in the same wings-open pose — but the bill ends in a hook where the anhinga’s ends in a dagger.

Where to look swimming low in the channel, or perched on pilings with its wings half open

Best time all day · Oct–Mar

Listen for Mostly silent away from a colony; a low, pig-like grunt at close range.

Tell it apart a hooked orange bill and a short tail; it floats with its back showing, where an anhinga shows only the neck

Common Gallinule Gallinula galeata

The chicken of the marsh: a red shield up the forehead, a candy-corn bill, and feet big enough to walk on lily pads. It swims with a constant forward jerk of the head, as though the water needed encouraging, and scolds anything that comes near.

Where to look out on the lily pads and along the reedy edges, walking on the vegetation

Best time all day · Year-round

Listen for A loud, laughing run of clucks and whinnies from inside the reeds.

Tell it apart a bright red bill and forehead shield tipped yellow, and a white stripe along the flank

Purple Gallinule Porphyrio martinica

Absurd in the best way: purple-blue in front, bronze-green behind, a pale blue shield on the forehead, a candy-red bill, and enormous yellow feet that carry it clean across the lily pads. It climbs the pickerelweed to pick seeds, and looks, honestly, painted.

Where to look walking the lily pads and pickerelweed in the quiet backwaters

Best time mornings · Apr–Aug

Tell it apart unmistakable — purple and green with a pale blue shield and long yellow legs

American Coot Fulica americana

Not a duck at all — a rail that took to open water, with each toe lobed rather than the whole foot webbed. It bobs its head as it swims, and it cannot simply lift off: it has to run flapping across the surface first. Winter brings big rafts of them onto the lakes.

Where to look rafts on the open lake and out at the canal mouth

Best time winter, all day · Nov–Mar

Tell it apart sooty black all over with a clean white bill and forehead — no red anywhere

Pied-billed Grebe Podilymbus podiceps

Small, brown, and able to do something a duck cannot: it squeezes the air out of its feathers and sinks, straight down, without a dive or a splash — and surfaces somewhere you are not looking. A black band rings the pale bill in the breeding season.

Where to look alone on quiet open water — and then not there

Best time calm mornings · Nov–Mar

Tell it apart small and brown with a short, thick pale bill; it sinks out of sight rather than diving

Wood Duck Aix sponsa

The drake has a fair claim to being the most ornate duck in North America — an iridescent green and purple head, a white-striped face, a chestnut breast, a red eye. They nest in tree holes over the swamp, and the day after hatching the ducklings climb to the entrance and jump — fifty feet if that is the drop — and walk away from it.

Where to look shaded cypress backwaters — they flush with a rising squeal

Best time dawn and dusk · Nov–Apr

Listen for The hen’s rising “oo-eek” squeal as she comes up off the water.

Tell it apart a crested head and a long square tail; the hen is plain grey-brown with a white teardrop around the eye

Florida Mottled Duck Anas fulvigula fulvigula

Florida’s own duck: it does not migrate, and the peninsula’s birds are found nowhere else on Earth. Both sexes look like a dark female mallard. The threat to it is not hunting but romance — released farmyard mallards interbreed with it, and state biologists call that the single biggest danger to the species.

Where to look paired up in the quiet shallows and the marsh ponds

Best time dawn and dusk · Nov–Apr

Tell it apart like a dark female mallard, but with a plain unstreaked buff throat and no white edging on the tail

Black-bellied Whistling Duck Dendrocygna autumnalis

A long-legged, goose-shaped duck that perches in trees, nests in holes, and announces itself with a whistle. Bright pink bill, grey face, chestnut body, a broad white wing stripe in flight. In 1981 there was one flock of them in Florida, at Sarasota; they now hold very nearly the whole peninsula.

Where to look perched on branches and lawns, or whistling over in a tight flock

Best time dusk, and overhead at any hour · Apr–Sep

Listen for A clear, high, four-note whistle from overhead; you hear the flock well before you see it.

Tell it apart a bright pink bill and long pink legs — and it whistles as it flies

American White Pelican Pelecanus erythrorhynchos

Nine feet of wingspan, and here only for the winter. It never dives from the air the way the coastal brown pelican does — instead a flock forms a line, swims at the shallows beating its wings, drives the fish ahead of it and dips together. In spring they leave for prairie lakes a thousand miles north.

Where to look in flocks on the open lakes — seldom in the canal itself

Best time winter, mid-morning · Dec–Mar

Tell it apart its sheer size — nine feet of white with black wingtips and a yellow-orange bill — and by the fact that it swims to feed and never plunges

Belted Kingfisher Megaceryle alcyon

It hangs on beating wings over the water, then goes in headfirst. The female is the brighter of the pair, with a rusty band across the belly the male simply does not have — which is the wrong way round for most birds, and nobody is quite sure why. Mostly a winter visitor here.

Where to look low perches and wires over the water — listen for the dry rattle

Best time all day · Oct–Feb

Listen for A hard, dry, mechanical rattle thrown back over its shoulder as it flies off ahead of you; it answers the slightest disturbance.

Limpkin Aramus guarauna

A bird that has bet everything on one snail. Apple snails are nearly its whole diet, and the bill is the tool: it never quite closes, so the tip grips like tweezers, and it bends slightly right to follow the shell’s own spiral. Find a neat pile of empty shells on the bank and you have found a limpkin’s table.

Where to look stalking the reedy shallows — you will usually hear it long before you see it

Best time dawn, dusk, and long after dark · Mar–May

Listen for A long, grating, high-pitched scream, mostly after dark, made with a looped windpipe. Cornell supplied one to Hollywood — it is the voice of the hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Fish Crow Corvus ossifragus

Identical to an American crow until it opens its mouth. The nasal two-note call is the whole identification — it sounds like a crow that has been asked a question and is denying everything. It patrols the water’s edge for anything edible, other birds’ eggs included.

Where to look everywhere — the dock, the trees, the lawn

Best time all day · Mar–Jul

Listen for A nasal, two-note “uh-uh” — the one reliable way to separate it from an American crow, though a young American crow can sound nasal too.

Tell it apart its voice alone — a short, nasal “uh-uh”, never the clean caw of an American crow

Live Oak Quercus virginiana

The tree that makes this canal look the way it does: a short massive trunk throwing limbs sideways as far as it throws them up, hung with Spanish moss. The wood is so dense and interlocked that the US Navy framed its first frigates from it — cannon balls bounced off the Constitution.

Where to look along the bank and through the hammock, spreading wider than it is tall

Best time any month; evergreen, and it drops old leaves in spring · Year-round

Tell it apart huge horizontal limbs and small leathery UNLOBED leaves, dark above and pale beneath

Laurel Oak Quercus laurifolia

The fast oak, and the short-lived one: it shoots up in a few decades, hollows out from the heart, and comes down in a storm around eighty years old. That is why so many are standing dead or half-gone. Straighter and far less spreading than a live oak, with willow-shaped leaves.

Where to look wet hammock edges and low ground near the canal

Best time any month; nearly evergreen, dropping leaves late winter · Year-round

Tell it apart narrow, smooth-edged leaves widest near the MIDDLE, on a tall straight trunk

Water Oak Quercus nigra

Look for a leaf shaped like a tiny spatula — narrow at the stem and flaring into three shallow lobes at the tip, like a duck’s foot. It is the commonest oak on wet ground here and, like the laurel oak, it rots early and falls young, which is good news for woodpeckers and bad for parked cars.

Where to look wet flats, ditch edges and disturbed ground near water

Best time any month; leaves drop late and briefly · Year-round

Tell it apart a small SPATULA-shaped leaf, flaring into three shallow lobes at the wide tip

Turkey Oak Quercus laevis

A small crooked oak of deep dry sand, and its leaf is the name: three long pointed lobes splayed like a turkey’s footprint. It turns the leaves edge-on to the midday sun to save water, so a stand of them looks oddly thin and vertical. Where you find it, the sand is very dry.

Where to look deep dry sandhill and scrub — not the canal bank

Best time any month; leaves turn red and drop in winter · Mar–Nov

Tell it apart a leaf like a TURKEY’S FOOT: three long pointed lobes, held edge-on to the sun

Sabal Palm Sabal palmetto

Florida’s state tree since 1953, and the cabbage palm of every old photograph. The fan leaf has a stalk running part-way into the blade, which no other palm here does. Old leaf bases can stay on the trunk as criss-crossed "bootjacks", and ferns and air plants set up in them.

Where to look the bank, the hammock and every roadside — everywhere

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a fan leaf with the stalk continuing INTO the blade, and a curved fringe of threads

Southern Magnolia Magnolia grandiflora

Thick glossy leaves, rusty-felted underneath, and a flower the size of a dinner plate that smells of lemon. The family is ancient enough that the flowers predate bees — they are built for beetles, with tough parts that will survive being chewed on by a clumsy pollinator.

Where to look moist hammock and old plantings, usually a big dark evergreen dome

Best time flowers May through June; the tree any month · Apr–Jun

Tell it apart huge leathery leaves with a RUSTY felt underside, and a cream flower the size of a plate

Red Maple Acer rubrum

The first tree to do anything each year: it flowers in January, before any leaf, and the swamps go faintly red weeks ahead of spring. Then the winged seeds spin down in February. Three-lobed leaves, red stalks, and a second show in autumn, which Florida hardly gets from anything else.

Where to look wet swamp, canal margins and low woods

Best time flowers Jan–Feb; the tree any month · Nov–Feb

Tell it apart a three-lobed leaf with a RED stalk; red flowers and winged seeds in midwinter

Sweetgum Liquidambar styraciflua

A star-shaped leaf that smells sharp and resinous when you crush it, and the reason nobody plants one by a path: the fruit is a hard spiked ball that drops in hundreds and rolls underfoot. It is one of the few trees here that colours properly in autumn, going red and purple.

Where to look moist woods and old fields near water

Best time autumn colour Nov–Dec; the tree any month · Oct–Dec

Tell it apart a five-pointed STAR-shaped leaf, and hard spiky seed balls all over the ground

Pond Cypress Taxodium ascendens

The bald cypress’s smaller cousin, and the way to separate them is to look at how the needles are held: pond cypress presses them close to the twig and points them UPWARD, so the branchlets look like green cords. It takes the stiller, poorer water — ponds and domes rather than flowing channels.

Where to look still ponds, cypress domes and poor wet flats rather than the moving canal

Best time any month; needles turn rusty and drop in winter · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart needles pressed UP against the twig like a cord; bald cypress spreads them flat in two rows

Slash Pine Pinus elliottii

The pine you are most likely to be standing under here. Needles in bundles of two and three, seven to ten inches long, and a trunk plated with big flaky orange-brown scales. It was the backbone of the turpentine industry — old trunks still carry the catface scars where the bark was cut.

Where to look wet flatwoods, planted rows and low ground everywhere

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart needles in bundles of TWO AND THREE mixed, and glossy red-brown cones

Longleaf Pine Pinus palustris

It spends its first five to twelve years as a tuft of grass with a taproot below, which is what lets fire run straight over it. Then it bolts. Needles up to eighteen inches in bundles of three, and a white candle of a bud at the tip. Around three per cent of the original forest is left.

Where to look old open pine on drier ground — worth a trip, not a canal tree

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart needles up to 18 inches in threes, and a silvery WHITE BUD at the branch tip

Sand Pine Pinus clausa

A scrubby, crooked little pine of pure white sand, and the Ocala forest is the largest stand of it on Earth. Short needles in twos, and cones that in the Ocala race stay shut on the branch for years — they need the heat of a fire to open, which is how the scrub regenerates all at once.

Where to look deep dry white sand scrub; the Ocala forest

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart SHORT needles in twos on a crooked small tree, with old closed cones still on the branches

Southern Red Cedar Juniperus virginiana

Not a cedar at all but a juniper, and the blue "berries" are tiny cones with a waxy bloom — the flavouring in gin. The heartwood is the red, sweet-smelling stuff of old closets and pencils, and it resists rot so well that fence posts cut a century ago are still standing.

Where to look shell mounds, bank edges and old fence lines, often leaning over water

Best time any month; berries blue in autumn · Year-round

Tell it apart scale-like dark green foliage and small BLUE waxy berries; the crushed foliage smells of pencil

Dahoon Holly Ilex cassine

A wetland holly with smooth-edged leaves — no spines at all, which surprises people — and a heavy crop of red berries the robins and waxwings strip in late winter. Only the female tree fruits. Its leaves carry caffeine too, though far less than its cousin the yaupon.

Where to look swamp edges, wet hammock and canal margins

Best time berries Nov–Feb; the tree any month · Year-round

Tell it apart SMOOTH-EDGED leaves with no spines, and dense red berries on the female tree

Red Bay Persea borbonia

Crush a leaf and it smells of bay leaf — this is the tree the seasoning comes from in the South. It is also in serious trouble: laurel wilt, a fungus carried by an imported ambrosia beetle since 2002, has killed most of the large red bays in Florida and reached all sixty-seven counties by 2011.

Where to look hammock and swamp edges — look for standing dead trunks too

Best time any month; evergreen · Year-round

Tell it apart a leaf that smells of BAY when crushed, often with raised galls, over a dark trunk

Sweetbay Magnolia Magnolia virginiana

A slender magnolia of wet ground, and the giveaway is the leaf: dark green above and chalky SILVER-WHITE beneath, so the whole tree flickers pale when the wind turns it. The flower is a small cream cup that smells of lemon, and it opens over a long season rather than all at once.

Where to look swamp edges, bayheads and wet woods

Best time flowers May through July; the tree any month · Apr–Aug

Tell it apart a leaf that is chalky SILVER underneath, and a small cream cup of a flower

Loblolly Bay Gordonia lasianthus

Neither a bay nor a magnolia but a relative of the tea plant, and in summer it hangs white camellia flowers with a boss of gold stamens all through the canopy. Glossy leaves with finely toothed edges. It likes acid, boggy ground and grows with the other two bays in dense bayheads.

Where to look acid bogs, bayheads and wet flatwoods edges

Best time flowers Jun–Aug; the tree any month · Jun–Aug

Tell it apart white CAMELLIA-like flowers with gold centres, and glossy finely TOOTHED leaves

Swamp Tupelo Nyssa biflora

A swamp tree with a swollen, fluted base that stands in water most of the year, and the source of tupelo honey — a honey that does not granulate, because of the sugars in the nectar. The leaves go scarlet early, often in September, before anything else has thought about autumn.

Where to look standing water in swamp and along the canal, often with cypress

Best time flowers in spring; leaves turn early, Sept–Oct · Year-round

Tell it apart a swollen fluted BASE in standing water, and leaves that turn scarlet very early

Pop Ash Fraxinus caroliniana

The little ash of standing water, often leaning out over it on a crooked trunk. Leaves are compound — five to seven leaflets on one stalk, which no other tree here does quite like this — and the seeds are flat papery paddles that spin down onto the surface and drift.

Where to look standing water and swamp edge, frequently leaning over the channel

Best time seeds spring and summer; the tree any month · Year-round

Tell it apart COMPOUND leaves of 5–7 leaflets, and flat papery winged seeds on the water

Common Persimmon Diospyros virginiana

The fruit is famously inedible until it is properly ripe — an unripe one dries your whole mouth out in seconds and you will not try a second. Left alone until it goes soft and orange in late autumn it is excellent, and every raccoon, possum and fox in the county knows it.

Where to look old fields, fence lines and dry woodland edges

Best time fruit ripe Oct–Dec · Oct–Dec

Tell it apart thick blocky bark cracked into SQUARES like alligator hide, and orange fruit in autumn

Chickasaw Plum Prunus angustifolia

A thicket-forming small plum that flowers before it leafs out, so in February a roadside turns into a wall of white and hums with the first bees of the year. The fruit that follows in May is small, red and tart, and the thicket it makes is prime cover for quail and rabbits.

Where to look old fields, fence lines and roadside thickets

Best time flowers Feb–Mar; fruit May · Feb–Mar, May

Tell it apart a THICKET of thorny twigs covered in white flowers before any leaves appear

Camphor Tree Cinnamomum camphora

Crush a leaf and there is no mistaking it — pure camphor, the smell of mothballs and old liniment. It was planted for shade and for the oil, and it has walked out of gardens across Florida ever since: birds take the black berries and drop them in every hammock.

Take care Invasive

Where to look old plantings, hammock edges and anywhere birds have perched

Best time any month; evergreen · Year-round

Tell it apart leaves that smell strongly of CAMPHOR when crushed, on a broad pale-barked tree

Chinese Tallow Triadica sebifera

The popcorn tree, named for the white waxy seeds that split open in autumn, and one of the worst invaders in the Southeast. Heart-shaped leaves on a long stalk that tremble like an aspen, and genuinely good red autumn colour — which is exactly why people kept planting it.

Take care Invasive

Where to look disturbed wet ground, ditch banks and old yards

Best time autumn colour and white seed Oct–Dec · Oct–Dec

Tell it apart a HEART-shaped leaf on a long trembling stalk, and clusters of white popcorn seeds

Ball Moss Tillandsia recurvata

A grey-green ball the size of a fist wedged into a branch fork, and it is not a moss and not a parasite — it is a bromeliad, a relative of the pineapple, taking everything it needs from rain and dust through its own leaves. The tree is a perch, nothing more.

Where to look wedged in branch forks of oaks and cypress, often in numbers on a dead limb

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a tight grey-green BALL on a branch, with stiff curling leaves — not a hanging drape

Coontie Zamia integrifolia

Florida’s only native cycad — a line of plants far older than flowers — and it looks like a stiff little fern with a cone in the middle. It is also the sole food of the atala butterfly’s caterpillars, and when coontie was dug up wholesale for its starch the butterfly nearly went with it.

Where to look dry hammock and sandy shade, often planted around buildings

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart stiff glossy fern-like fronds from a squat underground stem, with a cone at the centre

American Beautyberry Callicarpa americana

In autumn it carries tight clusters of magenta berries clasped right against the stem, a purple nothing else here comes close to. The crushed leaves were an old country mosquito repellent, and when the USDA went looking they found three genuinely repellent compounds in them and patented one.

Where to look woodland edges, fence lines and light shade

Best time berries Aug–Nov · Jul–Oct

Tell it apart bright MAGENTA berries in tight clusters pressed against the stem

Coral Bean Erythrina herbacea

Spikes of narrow scarlet tubes on a prickly stem in spring, built for a hummingbird’s bill and worked hard by them. In autumn the pods split to show hard scarlet seeds, which are handsome and poisonous — the alkaloids in them are related to curare, so admire and leave.

Where to look dry sandy edges, hammock margins and old fields

Best time flowers Mar–Jun; scarlet seeds in autumn · Mar–Jun

Tell it apart spikes of narrow SCARLET TUBES on a prickly stem; bright red seeds in a black pod later

Elderberry Sambucus canadensis

Flat white plates of tiny flowers on a soft-stemmed shrub in every wet ditch, followed by heavy bunches of small purple-black berries that birds clear in days. The flowers and ripe cooked fruit have been used for centuries; the stems, leaves and raw fruit are another matter entirely.

Where to look wet ditches, canal banks and any damp disturbed ground

Best time flowers and fruit much of the year; heaviest in summer · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart a FLAT-TOPPED plate of tiny white flowers on a hollow-stemmed shrub

Wax Myrtle Morella cerifera

Rub a leaf and it smells of bay rum. The pale blue-grey berries are coated in a true wax, which colonists boiled off to make bayberry candles — and which the yellow-rumped warbler and the tree swallow can actually digest, the trick that lets them both winter here in numbers.

Where to look wet edges, ditch banks and hammock margins, usually in thickets

Best time any month; berries in winter · Year-round

Tell it apart narrow aromatic leaves with a few teeth near the tip, and waxy pale BLUE-GREY berries

Tickseed Coreopsis floridana

Florida made the whole genus its state wildflower in 1991, which is why so many roadsides are sheeted in yellow — the highway plantings are mostly coreopsis. This is the Florida species: a lone yellow daisy on a long bare stalk over wet flatwoods, flowering into the autumn.

Where to look wet flatwoods, ditch edges and damp roadsides

Best time flowers late summer into autumn · Jul–Oct

Tell it apart a single YELLOW daisy on a long leafless stalk, the centre also yellow-brown

Blanket Flower Gaillardia pulchella

A daisy that looks like it has been dipped: deep red at the centre running out to yellow at the tips of the petals. It grows on pure sand and shrugs off salt and drought, so it holds dune and roadside alike. Whether it is truly native to Florida is still argued over.

Where to look sandy roadsides, dunes and dry open ground

Best time flowers spring through autumn · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart a daisy banded RED at the centre and YELLOW at the petal tips, on grey hairy stems

Spanish Needles Bidens alba

The small white daisy with a yellow eye that grows on every verge and in every gap, flowering all year round. It is a nuisance in one specific way — the black barbed seeds ride off on socks and dogs — and a serious asset in another: it is among the top nectar sources for Florida’s honeybees.

Where to look verges, waste ground, lawn edges and every disturbed gap

Best time any month — it never really stops · Year-round

Tell it apart a small WHITE daisy with a yellow centre, and black barbed seeds that stick to clothes

Spiderwort Tradescantia ohiensis

Three blue petals on a grassy stalk, open at dawn and gone by lunchtime — each flower lasts one morning and dissolves into a drop of fluid. The stamen hairs are a single file of cells, which made this plant a standard classroom microscope subject and, for a while, a biological radiation monitor.

Where to look roadsides, open sand and disturbed edges, in the morning

Best time flowers spring, and again after rain · Mar–May

Tell it apart THREE blue-violet petals over grass-like leaves, wilting to a jelly by midday

Maypop Passionflower Passiflora incarnata

The most complicated flower in this guide: a fringed purple corona over five stamens and three stigmas, which Spanish missionaries read as the instruments of the Passion. The name is the fruit — a hollow green egg that pops underfoot. It is the caterpillar food of the gulf fritillary butterfly.

Where to look fence lines, field edges and roadside tangles

Best time flowers and fruit summer into autumn · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart a purple FRINGED flower like no other, and a hollow green egg of a fruit

Coral Honeysuckle Lonicera sempervirens

The native honeysuckle, and the well-behaved one: whorls of narrow coral-red trumpets, yellow inside, on a vine that climbs without strangling anything. There is no scent, because it is not courting moths — it is courting hummingbirds, and it flowers almost all year here for them.

Where to look fence lines, shrub edges and low trees, climbing

Best time flowers spring, and on and off all year · Mar–Jun

Tell it apart whorls of narrow CORAL-RED trumpets with no scent, and paired leaves fused under the flowers

Firebush Hamelia patens

Clusters of slim orange-red tubes from spring until the first cold, and one of the few plants that reliably brings in hummingbirds, zebra longwings and gulf fritillaries at the same time. The leaves and stems flush red in sun. Frost knocks it down and it comes straight back from the root.

Where to look sunny edges and plantings near buildings

Best time flowers spring through autumn, until frost · Apr–Oct

Tell it apart clusters of slim ORANGE-RED tubes at the branch tips, with reddish leaf stalks

Muscadine Grape Vitis rotundifolia

The native grape of the South, thick-skinned and musky, hanging in small loose bunches rather than tight ones. Bronze-fruited forms are the scuppernong. Its tendrils are unbranched, which separates it from every other grape here, and the bark does not shred off in strips as theirs does.

Where to look climbing through hammock trees and along fence lines

Best time fruit Aug–Sep; the vine any month · Year-round

Tell it apart UNBRANCHED tendrils and tight bark that does not peel; small loose bunches of thick-skinned fruit

Virginia Creeper Parthenocissus quinquefolia

The vine everybody mistakes for poison ivy, and the difference is simple enough to count: FIVE leaflets here, three on poison ivy. It climbs on adhesive pads rather than rootlets, turns a good scarlet in autumn, and its blue berries are a serious bird food and seriously poisonous to people.

Where to look climbing trunks, fences and walls, and sprawling over the ground

Best time any month; scarlet in autumn · Year-round

Tell it apart FIVE leaflets from one point — poison ivy has three; climbs on sticky pads, not hairy roots

Lantana Lantana camara

Flat heads of little flowers that change colour as they age, so one head is yellow, orange and pink at once — and butterflies work it all day. It is also a listed invasive that hybridises with Florida’s own rarer native lantana, and its green berries are the part that poisons livestock and children.

Take care Invasive

Where to look roadsides, old plantings and disturbed sunny ground

Best time any month, flowering almost continuously · Year-round

Tell it apart a flat head of tiny flowers in TWO OR THREE colours at once, over rough aromatic leaves

Dog Fennel Eupatorium capillifolium

The tall feathery plume that takes over any Florida field left alone for a season — native, not introduced, and thoroughly weedy about it. The foliage is finely divided and smells sharp and medicinal when crushed. Cattle avoid it, which is a large part of why there is so much of it.

Where to look old fields, ditch banks and any ground left alone

Best time tallest and flowering late summer into autumn · May–Oct

Tell it apart a tall FEATHERY plume of thread-fine leaves, aromatic when crushed

Butterfly Weed Asclepias tuberosa

The orange milkweed, and the odd one out in its family: break a stem and the sap runs clear, not milky. Monarch and queen caterpillars eat it and take up its toxins for their own defence. It sends a deep taproot down into dry sand, which is why it hates being moved.

Where to look dry sandy roadsides, open pine and old fields

Best time flowers late spring through summer · Apr–Aug

Tell it apart flat heads of BRIGHT ORANGE flowers, and CLEAR sap where a milkweed should run white

Buttonbush Cephalanthus occidentalis

A shrub that stands in the water and hangs it with white pincushions — perfect spheres of tiny flowers, each one with a long style sticking out, so the whole head looks like a pinned ball. It is heavily worked by bees and butterflies, and the seed heads feed ducks all winter.

Where to look standing in shallow water at the canal and pond edges

Best time flowers Jun–Sep · May–Sep

Tell it apart perfect white SPHERES of flowers like pincushions, on a shrub standing in water

Yaupon Holly Ilex vomitoria

One of only two plants native to North America that make caffeine — and the other, dahoon holly, is also in this guide. Southeastern nations brewed its roasted leaves as the ceremonial "black drink". The species name accuses it of causing vomiting, which the tea does not do; the ceremony did.

Where to look hammock edges, fence lines and old plantings, often a dense thicket

Best time berries autumn and winter; the shrub any month · Year-round

Tell it apart small leaves with rounded TEETH and translucent red berries; the dahoon’s leaves are smooth-edged

Florida Rosemary Ceratiola ericoides

A grey-green dome on white sand that is not a rosemary at all, though it smells like one. It poisons the ground around itself: a compound washed off its leaves stops other seeds germinating, which is why each bush sits in its own bare sand ring with nothing but lichen in it.

Where to look deep white sand scrub on the ridges — a trip, not the canal

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a rounded grey-green aromatic shrub sitting in its own BARE SAND ring

Adam’s Needle Yucca filamentosa

A rosette of stiff swords with curling threads peeling off the leaf edges, and a tall spike of cream bells in spring. It has exactly one pollinator: a small white moth that deliberately packs pollen into the flower and then lays eggs in it, so each needs the other to exist at all.

Where to look dry sandy ground, old yards and roadside banks

Best time flowers Apr–Jun · Mar–Jun

Tell it apart stiff sword leaves with white THREADS curling off their edges, and a tall spike of cream bells

Prickly Pear Cactus Opuntia austrina

Florida has a native cactus, and this is it: flat green pads, big waxy yellow flowers in spring, and dark red fruit. The long spines are the obvious hazard and the smaller one is worse — clusters of tiny barbed hairs called glochids that come off at a touch and are very hard to get out.

Take care Danger

What to do Do not brush against it or pick the fruit bare-handed. The tiny barbed hairs come off at a touch, work into skin and can itch for weeks; lift them with tweezers, not fingers.

Where to look dry sand, scrub and open sandy roadsides

Best time flowers Apr–Jun; red fruit in summer · Mar–Aug

Tell it apart flat green PADS with tufts of bristles, and a waxy yellow flower the size of a fist

Reindeer Lichen Cladonia evansii

The pale grey-white crunch underfoot in dry scrub, often called deer moss, and it is neither moss nor a single organism — a fungus and an alga living as one. It grows a few millimetres a year, so a patch the size of a dinner plate has been there for decades. Dry, it shatters; wet, it springs back.

Where to look open white sand in scrub and dry pine, between the shrubs

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a pale GREY-WHITE springy mat of fine branching stalks on bare sand

Air Potato Dioscorea bulbifera

A vine that can put on eight inches in a day and reach seventy feet, smothering whole trees under heart-shaped leaves. It spreads by the potato-like bulbils hanging along the stems, not by seed. Since 2012 a leaf beetle released as a control has been eating it back, and it works.

Take care Invasive

Where to look smothering trees and fences on disturbed ground near water

Best time growing and dropping bulbils summer into autumn · Apr–Oct

Tell it apart HEART-shaped leaves with curved veins, and brown warty POTATOES hanging on the vine

Cogongrass Imperata cylindrica

Listed among the worst weeds in the world, and it wins by burning: it builds dense dry fuel and carries fire hotter than native ground cover, killing what it cannot outgrow. A silvery cylindrical flower plume in spring, and a leaf with an off-centre pale midrib — that off-centre rib is the tell.

Take care Invasive

Where to look roadsides, firebreaks and disturbed edges, in expanding circular patches

Best time silver plumes Mar–May; the grass any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a pale midrib set OFF-CENTRE in the leaf, and a silky silver-white flower plume

Pickerelweed Pontederia cordata

The blue spikes along the canal edge all summer, over glossy heart-shaped leaves standing clear of the water. Bees work it constantly, and the seeds are eaten by ducks. It holds the bank together, and the shallow tangle of its stems is where small fish and young alligators hide.

Where to look shallow edges of the canal and the lakes, standing in water

Best time flowers spring through autumn · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a spike of soft BLUE flowers over a glossy heart-shaped leaf held above the water

Alligator Flag Thalia geniculata

The tallest thing growing in the marsh — huge paddle leaves on stalks well over head height, with the flowers dangling on a zigzag stem above them. The name is a warning that works: clumps of it mark the open water alligators keep clear around their holes, so a stand of flag often means a gator.

Where to look deeper marsh and pond edges, standing above everything else

Best time flowers summer into autumn · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart enormous PADDLE leaves head-high or more, with flowers hanging from a zigzag stalk

Cattail Typha domingensis

The brown sausage on a stick everyone knows, and it is not a flower but thousands of them packed tight — the fluffy seed head that follows can hold a quarter of a million seeds. It spreads hard through disturbed and nutrient-rich water, which on this chain usually means somewhere fertiliser is running in.

Where to look shallow standing water, ditches and marsh, often in dense stands

Best time brown heads summer into winter · Year-round

Tell it apart a dense brown SAUSAGE on a tall round stem, over flat strap leaves

Sawgrass Cladium jamaicense

The plant the Everglades is made of — the "river of grass" is this, for miles. It is a sedge rather than a grass, and the edges of every leaf and the underside of the midrib carry fine backward-pointing teeth that will open your skin like a paper cut, only longer and deeper.

Take care Danger

What to do Do not push through a stand of it, and never grab a blade to steady yourself. The saw-toothed edges cut bare skin, arms and legs badly; go round it, and wear long sleeves if you must wade near it.

Where to look shallow marsh and wet prairie edges, in dense tall stands

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a tall stiff blade with SERRATED edges you can feel with a fingertip — carefully

Spatterdock Nuphar advena

The yellow one. A half-open globe of thick waxy sepals that never really opens flat, sitting on a stem above big arrowhead-shaped leaves that stand up out of the water as often as they float. Bass and bream hold in its shade all summer, and it is the first pad growth up each spring.

Where to look slow shallow water along the canal and lake edges

Best time flowers spring through autumn · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a YELLOW half-open globe, and leaves that stand UP out of the water as well as float

American Lotus Nelumbo lutea

Unmistakable and enormous: round leaves up to two feet across held high above the water on a central stalk, with no slit in them at all. Water beads and rolls straight off the surface. The pale yellow flower gives way to a woody showerhead of a seed pod that everybody recognises from dried arrangements.

Where to look quiet backwaters and protected shallows, in large colonies

Best time flowers Jun–Sep · May–Sep

Tell it apart a huge ROUND leaf with NO slit, held high above the water; a woody showerhead seed pod

Arrowhead Sagittaria lancifolia

Also called duck potato, for the starchy tubers on the roots that ducks and muskrats dig out. Three round white petals with a yellow centre, in whorls up a stalk. The Florida species carries a long lance-shaped leaf rather than the sharp arrow of its northern relatives, which catches people out.

Where to look shallow edges, wet ditches and marsh

Best time flowers spring through autumn · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart THREE rounded white petals in whorls up the stalk, over lance-shaped upright leaves

String Lily Crinum americanum

A true swamp lily: a cluster of long white straps of petals on a thick stalk, standing in the water and scenting the air at dusk for the sphinx moths that pollinate it. The bulb is large and deep, and poisonous. It flowers on and off through the warm months rather than all at once.

Where to look standing in shallow water at swamp and canal margins

Best time flowers spring through autumn, and after rain · Mar–Sep

Tell it apart narrow WHITE STRAPS of petals curling back from a cluster, on a thick fleshy stalk

Blue Flag Iris Iris virginica

The native iris of the marsh, flowering violet-blue in spring with a yellow blaze guiding insects down the throat of each fall. It grows from a creeping rhizome in shallow water — and that rhizome is toxic, which is worth knowing because it looks very like the edible sweet flag it grows beside.

Where to look shallow marsh, wet ditches and canal edges

Best time flowers Mar–May · Mar–May

Tell it apart a violet-blue IRIS with a YELLOW blaze on each drooping petal, from flat fans of leaves

Bladderwort Utricularia juncea

A carnivorous plant, and the fastest mover in the whole plant kingdom. The tiny bladders on its submerged stems pump themselves empty, and when a water flea touches a trigger hair the door snaps in under a millisecond and the animal is sucked in at 600 g. Above water it is just a small yellow flower.

Where to look still shallow water, ditches and marsh pools, mostly submerged

Best time flowers warm months · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart small YELLOW snapdragon-like flowers on a bare stalk, with a hair-fine tangle below the surface

Eelgrass Vallisneria americana

Long green ribbons streaming with the current, rooted on the bottom — and the single most important plant on this chain for manatees, which graze the beds. The female flower rides up to the surface on a coiled stalk, is pollinated there, then the coil winds back down to ripen the seed underwater.

Where to look rooted on the bottom in clear shallow water, streaming with the current

Best time any month; growing hardest in the warm months · Year-round

Tell it apart flat green RIBBONS up to several feet long, all rooted in one place on the bottom

Maidencane Panicum hemitomon

The native grass that makes the floating tussock edges on these lakes — a dense stand of it will hold together as a mat you could nearly stand on, and that mat is where bass spawn and where young fish hide. It stands a few feet out of shallow water on a creeping underwater stem.

Where to look shallow lake and canal margins, in dense standing beds

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart an upright grass standing in water in a dense even bed, leaves held stiffly out from the stem

Torpedo Grass Panicum repens

Brought in as cattle forage and now one of the most expensive weeds in Florida to fight. It drives sharp pointed rhizomes through mud and shoreline — the torpedoes of the name — and takes over the shallow edge from maidencane and everything else, leaving a monoculture fish do not use.

Take care Invasive

Where to look shallow shorelines, ditch edges and disturbed bank, forming solid stands

Best time any month · Year-round

Tell it apart a stiff blue-green grass spreading from sharp POINTED white rhizomes in the mud

Water Hyacinth Pontederia crassipes

A beautiful catastrophe. Given away as souvenirs at the 1884 New Orleans cotton exposition and tipped into the St Johns a few years later, it went on to blanket a hundred thousand acres of Florida water. A mat can double in under a fortnight. The float is a swollen, spongy, air-filled leaf stalk.

Take care Invasive

Where to look drifting mats on open water and against banks and booms

Best time any month; worst in the warm season · Year-round

Tell it apart a SWOLLEN spongy bulb in the leaf stalk holding it up, and a lavender flower spike

Water Lettuce Pistia stratiotes

A floating rosette exactly like an open head of lettuce, pale green and deeply ribbed, with a beard of fine roots hanging below. It travels on the wind, forms mats that shut out light and oxygen, and reproduces by throwing off daughter plants on runners — one becomes a raft very quickly.

Take care Invasive

Where to look drifting on still water, in coves and against banks

Best time any month; worst in the warm season · Year-round

Tell it apart a floating rosette like a pale open LETTUCE, velvety and ribbed, with roots trailing below

Hydrilla Hydrilla verticillata

Florida’s worst submerged weed, released from the aquarium trade in the 1950s and now in most of the chain. It grows up from the bottom and mats at the surface, and it can regrow from a fragment the size of a fingernail — which is why boat trailers are washed down. Whorls of toothed leaves.

Take care Invasive

Where to look below the surface in most of the chain, matting on top in calm water

Best time any month; densest late summer · Year-round

Tell it apart WHORLS of four to eight small leaves with visibly TOOTHED edges, rough to the touch

Duckweed Lemna minor

The green film on still water that people take for algae or spilled paint. It is a flowering plant, and among the smallest there are: each grain is a whole individual, a few millimetres of leaf with one root hanging down. It reproduces by budding, and it can double in about two days.

Where to look still sheltered water, coves, ditches and under overhanging banks

Best time any month; thickest in warm still weather · Year-round

Tell it apart a carpet of separate tiny GREEN GRAINS, each with a single root — not slime and not algae

Primrose-willow Ludwigia peruviana

Big bright yellow four-petalled flowers on a tall soft shrub standing in the water, and it looks like something you would plant on purpose. It is a listed invasive from South America that crowds out the native marsh edge, seeds heavily, and comes straight back from the stump when it is cut.

Take care Invasive

Where to look wet ditches, canal banks and marsh edges, in tall stands

Best time flowers most of the year, heaviest in summer · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart large FOUR-petalled yellow flowers on a tall soft-wooded shrub standing in water

Alligator Weed Alternanthera philoxeroides

Hollow stems that mat out over the water from the bank, with small papery white clover-like heads. It was the first aquatic weed anywhere to be fought with imported insects, back in the 1960s, and the flea beetle they released still keeps it down in the warmer parts of Florida.

Take care Invasive

Where to look matting out from banks over shallow water, and in wet ditches

Best time flowers spring through autumn · Mar–Oct

Tell it apart a HOLLOW jointed stem and small papery WHITE clover-like heads on a stalk

Bald Cypress Taxodium distichum

The cathedral tree of the canal, and older than the canal itself: this was the Elfin River until 1882, when crews widened it for the steamboats, and the cypress were already old men by then. The species can pass 2,000 years. What the woody “knees” along the bank are actually for still genuinely puzzles botanists after two centuries of argument.

Where to look lining both banks — the knees poke up along the waterline

Best time golden hour · Mar–Aug, Oct–Nov

Spanish Moss Tillandsia usneoides

Not a moss, and not a parasite: it is an air plant in the pineapple family, and the tree is a perch and nothing more. It has no roots at all. Every drop it drinks comes in through the tiny silvery scales that sheathe each strand and give the whole thing its grey.

Where to look draped from the cypress and oak canopy overhead

Best time any time · Year-round

Resurrection Fern Pleopeltis michauxiana

In a dry spell it curls up grey and to all appearances dead, having let go of more than 95% of its water. Then it rains, and within about half a day it is photosynthesising again as though nothing had happened. It only rides on the bark; it takes nothing from the tree.

Where to look carpeting the tops of the big oak and cypress limbs

Best time right after rain · Apr–Sep

White Waterlily Nymphaea odorata

The fragrant white blooms keep office hours: open in the early morning, shut again by around noon. The pads below them are the busiest real estate on the canal — shade and cover for the fish underneath, a dry platform for the frogs and dragonflies on top.

Where to look quiet coves and canal edges

Best time mornings · May–Sep

Saw Palmetto Serenoa repens

Ancient, and built to outlive a fire: the stem that matters runs along underground, so the plant simply sends up new fans once the burn has passed. The spring flowers are a serious nectar source, and the berries feed black bears, foxes and better than a hundred kinds of bird.

Where to look the shady understory along the banks

Best time any time · May–Jun

Florida Cottonmouth Agkistrodon conanti

The one to learn: the only venomous snake you are likely to meet at the water’s edge here. Blocky head, a dark mask through the eye, a pale stripe along the lip; youngsters wiggle a yellow tail tip like a caterpillar to lure frogs in. Cornered, it will not run — it coils and gapes a mouth as white as cotton. Take that at its word. It does not chase people; that part is folklore.

Take care Danger

What to do Give it room. Step back, let it leave, and never try to move or kill it — most bites happen to people handling snakes.

Where to look shorelines, dock pilings and the brush along the bank, often basking in the open

Best time warm afternoons, and warm nights after rain · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart a thick body, a blocky head with a dark eye-stripe and a vertical pupil, and a facial pit between eye and nostril; it holds its ground and gapes white

Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake Crotalus adamanteus

The largest venomous snake in North America, and not a canal animal at all — it belongs to dry ground, the palmetto scrub and the sandhill pine. Bold diamonds down the back, and a rattle that carries a long way when it is used. Do not count on hearing it: one that would rather go unnoticed lies still and says nothing. Uncommon here, and scarcer every year.

Take care Danger

What to do If you hear the buzz, stop, find it, and walk the other way — it will not follow. And watch your feet on dry ground: silence is not an all-clear.

Where to look dry uplands and palmetto scrub away from the water — seldom near the canal

Best time spring and autumn mornings · Apr–May, Sep–Oct

Dusky Pygmy Rattlesnake Sistrurus miliarius barbouri

Florida’s most abundant venomous snake, and the easiest to step near: a foot or two of grey and dark blotches with a rusty stripe down the back, lying still in the leaf litter at a trail edge. The rattle is so slight it passes for an insect, which is how people walk right up to one. Bites hurt, and tissue damage is common — but no death from one has ever been recorded.

Take care Danger

What to do Watch where you put your feet and hands in leaf litter, and step wide around one you spot.

Where to look leaf litter along trail edges and the base of palmettos

Best time warm days, especially late summer · May–Oct

Eastern Coral Snake Micrurus fulvius

Slender, secretive, and ringed red, yellow and black the whole way round. The head is the surest tell: this one’s snout is black, where its harmless mimics — the scarlet kingsnake and the scarlet snake — have red heads. The old rhyme — red touching yellow — works on a normally marked snake; the black snout works on all of them. It lives under leaf litter and logs, and almost never bites unless it is picked up.

Take care Danger

What to do So don’t handle it. Leave it under its log and it will stay there.

Where to look under leaf litter, logs and mulch on the drier ground

Best time spring and autumn, after rain · Apr–May, Sep–Oct

Red Imported Fire Ant Solenopsis invicta

A South American ant that came ashore at Mobile in the 1930s in soil used as ship’s ballast, and now owns most Florida lawns. The giveaway is the mound: a crumbly dome with no hole in the top, because the ants come and go through tunnels that run yards out from it. Stand on one and hundreds pour out at once, stinging together and raising white pustules that itch for days.

Take care Danger · Invasive

What to do Look before you set down a chair, a towel or a bare foot. Stung? Brush them off fast, wash, and watch anyone who is allergic to stings.

Where to look lawn mounds, along paths, and at the base of the docks

Best time any warm day; mounds show best after rain · Mar–Oct

Poison Ivy Toxicodendron radicans

Leaves of three, let it be. It climbs the oaks and cypress as a rope of a vine furred with red-brown hairs; the three glossy leaflets may be toothed or smooth, and turn red in spring and again in autumn. Every part carries the same oil — leaf, stem, root, and the bare winter vine with no leaf on it at all. The rash follows hours or days later.

Take care Danger

What to do Don’t touch the hairy vines on the trees. If you brush against it, wash with soap and cool water as soon as you can — the oil starts binding to skin within about fifteen minutes.

Where to look vines up the oaks and cypress, and the shady edges of the lawn

Best time year-round; in leaf March to November · Apr–Oct

Mosquitoes and No-see-ums Culicidae / Culicoides

Dusk on the water belongs to them. Mosquitoes rise after the summer rains; the no-see-ums are biting midges one to three millimetres long — small enough to walk straight through an ordinary window screen — and they work the still, humid air at dawn and dusk from April into November. Neither will spoil a stay. Both will spoil a sunset.

Take care Nuisance

What to do Bring repellent — we mean it — and long sleeves for the last hour of light.

Where to look anywhere along the water’s edge at last light

Best time dawn and dusk, on still humid air, April into November · May–Oct

Lovebugs Plecia nearctica

Twice a year — four or five weeks from late April, and again from late August — the air fills with small black flies joined in pairs, drifting over the road and the lawn. They neither bite nor sting; they are march flies, and their larvae spend their lives quietly composting the lawn. The only thing they harm is car paint.

Take care Nuisance

What to do Nothing to do but wash the windshield the same day — they turn acidic as they break down.

Where to look everywhere — over the lawn, the road and the dock

Best time mid-morning to late afternoon, in the two flights · May, Sep

No-see-ums Culicoides spp.

Biting midges one to three millimetres long — small enough to walk straight through an ordinary window screen, which is how they get in. You feel the bite and see nothing, which is the whole of the name. They work still, humid air at dawn and dusk from April into November, and a breeze is the best defence there is.

Take care Nuisance

What to do Repellent on exposed skin, and sit where the air is moving — a fan on the porch works better than anything you can spray.

Where to look the water’s edge and the porch at last light, worst when the air is dead still

Best time dawn and dusk on still air, April into November · Apr–May, Sep–Oct

Tell it apart you will not see it; a sudden sharp bite with nothing on your arm is the identification

Southern Black Widow Latrodectus mactans

Glossy jet black, with a red hourglass on the underside of the abdomen — on this species a single joined shape, not two separate marks. She is not aggressive and will not come at you; the bites happen when a hand goes somewhere unseen and she is between it and the wall. Her webs are untidy tangles in dark, still, sheltered places.

Take care Danger

What to do Look before you reach into a dark corner — under the dock, behind a pot, inside a rarely used shed. Wear gloves for that kind of job. A bite needs medical advice, not a wait-and-see.

Where to look tangled webs in dark, undisturbed corners — under decking, behind pots, in sheds

Best time any month; more noticed in the warm ones · Jun–Sep

Tell it apart glossy black with a single joined red hourglass underneath, and a messy tangled web

Brown Widow Latrodectus geometricus

Now the commoner widow around Florida buildings, and the easiest to identify without ever seeing the spider: the egg sac gives it away, a pale ball covered in little spikes like a sandspur. The spider is grey-brown and patterned, with an orange or yellow hourglass. Its venom is stronger than a black widow’s drop for drop, but it delivers far less and would much rather hide.

Take care Danger

What to do The same rule as the black widow: look before you reach into anywhere dark. Spiky egg sacs under the rails mean the spiders are there too.

Where to look under rails, chairs, letterboxes and the underside of anything left outdoors

Best time any month, most obvious in summer · Apr–Oct

Tell it apart grey-brown and patterned with an orange hourglass — and a spiky egg sac like a tiny sandspur

Puss Caterpillar Megalopyge opercularis

It looks like a scrap of orange fur, and it is one of the most venomous caterpillars in the United States. Under the fur are hollow spines that break off in skin; the sting is an immediate deep burn with a grid of red spots in it, and it can bring on swelling and nausea. The temptation to touch something that soft is the entire danger.

Take care Danger

What to do Do not touch it — and tell children that first, because it looks strokeable. Stung? Strip the spines out with sticky tape pressed on and pulled off, then ice it. Get help for swelling, breathing trouble or a bad reaction.

Where to look on oak and elm leaves, and on anything the wind drops them onto

Best time late summer and autumn · Aug–Oct

Tell it apart a teardrop of soft orange-brown “fur” with a tail, about an inch long; no obvious head

Saddleback Caterpillar Acharia stimulea

Unmistakable and unmissable: a brown caterpillar wearing a bright green blanket with a purple-brown saddle in the middle of it, and four fat horns of spines at either end. The spines are hollow, tipped with venom, and break off in the skin. Nothing else here looks remotely like it, which is the plant’s warning working exactly as intended.

Take care Danger

What to do Do not brush it off with a bare hand. Lift the spines out with sticky tape, then ice it; see someone if the reaction spreads.

Where to look the undersides of leaves on shrubs, palms and garden plants — found by reaching, not by looking

Best time late summer into autumn · Aug–Oct

Tell it apart a green “saddle blanket” with a brown oval in the middle, and spiny horns at both ends

Paper Wasps Polistes spp.

The open grey nest under an eave, a rail or the underside of the dock, like a small upturned umbrella with the cells showing and the wasps standing on them. They are not looking for you and will ignore you entirely until the nest is jarred — then they defend it, and unlike a bee each one can sting more than once.

Take care Danger

What to do Look under rails and eaves before you lean, sit or put a hand up. If a nest is somewhere you cannot avoid, tell us rather than knocking it down yourself.

Where to look under eaves, rails, dock boards and garden furniture

Best time spring through autumn; nests grow through the summer · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart an open, unwrapped grey comb like a small umbrella, with the wasps visible on it

Southern Yellowjacket Vespula squamosa

The one that nests in the ground, and the reason that matters is that you find it with your feet. The nest is hidden in a hole or under a board, so there is no umbrella of comb to spot; the first sign is usually wasps pouring out. Each of them can sting over and over, and in a warm winter a southern colony carries on rather than dying back, so the nests get very large.

Take care Danger

What to do If wasps come up out of the ground, walk away quickly and keep going — they follow. Mark the spot and tell us. Anyone allergic to stings should carry what they normally carry.

Where to look ground holes, wall voids, and under sheds and decking

Best time warm months, and nests at their biggest in late summer · May–Oct

Tell it apart black and yellow like a paper wasp, but going in and out of a hole in the ground

Lone Star Tick Amblyomma americanum

The commonest tick to bite people in Florida, and the female is easy: one silvery-white spot in the middle of her back. It is also the tick behind alpha-gal syndrome — a bite that can leave a person allergic to red meat, with reactions hours after a meal rather than minutes. That is rare, and it is the reason to take ticks seriously rather than brush them off.

Take care Danger

What to do Walk the middle of paths, check yourself and children after anything long-grass, and check dogs too. Found one attached? Pull it straight out with fine tweezers as close to the skin as you can get — no twisting, no burning — and wash the spot.

Where to look long grass, brush and the edges of shaded paths

Best time warm months, worst spring into summer · Mar–Jun

Tell it apart a single silvery-white spot on the female’s back; males have pale streaks round the rim

Chiggers Trombiculidae

Almost nobody has seen one. The biting stage is a mite larva too small to make out, and it does not burrow and does not drink blood — it spits a digestive enzyme into the skin, builds a straw out of the hardened tissue, and feeds through that. The welt and the itch arrive later, after the mite has already gone. Nail polish does nothing: there is nothing under there to smother.

Take care Nuisance

What to do Repellent round ankles, socks over trouser cuffs, and a hot soapy shower as soon as you come in from long grass. Then anti-itch cream and leave it alone.

Where to look long grass, weedy edges and brush — they wait on the tips and climb on

Best time warm months, in long grass and leaf litter · Apr–Sep

Tell it apart you will not see it; a cluster of intensely itchy welts round sock lines and waistbands is the sign

Yellow Fly Diachlorus ferrugatus

Described by entomologists at the University of Florida as the most aggressive fly in the state, which is saying something. It is a stocky yellow horsefly with purple-banded green eyes, and the female cuts rather than pierces — the bite hurts at once and can blister days later. It hunts in shade and follows anything warm that moves.

Take care Nuisance

What to do It comes for you in shade and at the water’s edge in late spring. Repellent, long sleeves, and keep moving — they are much less interested in a moving target.

Where to look shaded banks and the wood’s edge, especially on still afternoons

Best time late spring into early summer, in shade · May–Jun

Tell it apart a stout yellow fly about a centimetre long with black front legs and green eyes banded purple

Tread-softly Cnidoscolus stimulosus

The name is the instruction. A low plant with deeply lobed leaves and pretty white flowers, and every part of it — stem, leaf, flower, fruit — is armed with long stiff hollow hairs that break off in skin and inject an irritant. Brushing past is enough. Its other name is finger rot, which tells you how much people enjoyed picking the flowers.

Take care Danger

What to do Bare legs and sandy ground are a bad combination. If you are stung, do not rub it in — lift what you can with sticky tape, wash, and expect it to hurt for a while.

Where to look dry sandy ground, path edges and open scrub

Best time spring and summer, when it flowers · Mar–Jun

Tell it apart deeply lobed leaves and white five-petalled flowers on a plant covered in visible stiff hairs

Brazilian Pepper Schinus terebinthifolia

Florida’s most successful plant invader — brought in as an ornamental before 1900 and now holding something over 750,000 acres — and a relative of poison ivy that gets far less warning. Same family, same kind of oil, same rash in people who react to it, and the smoke from burning it is worse. The red berries at Christmas are why people used to call it Florida holly.

Take care Danger · Invasive

What to do Treat it like poison ivy: don’t handle it, and never burn it. Wash with soap and cool water if you brush against it.

Where to look thickets along disturbed edges, ditches and fence lines

Best time year-round; berries red from late autumn · Oct–Jan

Tell it apart compound leaves with a winged midrib, crushed leaves smelling of turpentine, and dense clusters of red berries

Eastern Velvet Ant Dasymutilla occidentalis

Not an ant at all but a wingless female wasp, covered in bright red-orange velvet and walking fast across open sand. Its other name is the cow killer, which is an exaggeration, but only about the cow: the sting is widely rated the most painful of any insect in the Southeast. It has no nest to defend and no interest in you, so the stings happen to bare feet.

Take care Danger

What to do Do not pick it up, and do not walk sandy ground barefoot. That is genuinely the whole of it.

Where to look open sand and bare ground, moving at speed

Best time warm months, in the middle of the day · May–Sep

Tell it apart a big, fast, wingless “ant” in vivid red-orange velvet — no real ant here looks like it