So far, we've seen caves and bats dinosaurs and ancient oceans. Georgia is
a pretty remarkable state but there's one more place we're going to explore
today that is full of mystery. That place is the okefenokee swamp, in the
southeastern corner of the state near Waycross.
The dinosaurs that once roamed Georgia may be extinct but some of their cousins
are very much alive. Alligators are the descendants of crocodiles that were 50
feet long, as big as an 18-wheel truck. They lived here 100 million years ago.
Today their smaller cousins live here the Okefenokee Swamp. There are still
parts of the Okefenokee that no human beings have ever visited and the
wildlife here can seem strange and wonderful. The swamp is a mysterious place. Some
people even say there are ghosts here and when you're out here all alone
except for the alligators and the birds and the dark forest draped with Spanish
moss, it's not so hard to believe there might be ghosts.
Don Berryhill knows the
swamp and many of its secrets. He's a science specialist with the Okefenokee
Regional Education Service Agency.
This is a female Gator. She stays right in
this area here. This is her little domain. She's been in this area now for about
two years and she's about 25 years old.
What does she eat?
Alligators eat the things that live where they live and since they live
partly in the water and partly on the land and the water they'd catch things
like fish and turtles and frogs and snakes.
On the land they might catch a raccoon or a fox or a possum. Occasionally, we
have known them to even catch and eat bear.
How can an alligator kill a big bear?
When bears try to swim a lake or a river or a stream in the swamp, they're taking a
chance because an alligator can come up from underneath, grab them by the foot,
and pull them under and drown them and then they can eat at their own leisure.
It may seem heartless but that's life on the food chain here in the swamp. It's
eat or be eaten. Even the plants are killers. The pitcher plant for example it
looks innocent enough but Don knows differently.
The plants you see here boys
on your right are called pitcher plants. These plants eat insects and they catch
them by producing an odor and the color and so insects are attracted. They crawl
up the side and they go underneath the hood because that's where the odor is
and when they get on that lip inside they slip. And when they fall down inside,
there's a digestive enzyme. There's a chemical in there that actually begins
to digest them just like when we eat food our chemicals have to digest it for
us. They have digestive enzymes that break down flies, bugs, grasshoppers,
mosquitoes, things like that.
Throughout the swamp plants and animals have
adapted to their environment in all kinds of ways in order to survive. The
writing spider is another example. This spider makes a zigzag pattern in its web
that makes it easy for birds and bats to see so they don't fly into the web and destroy it.
So this is a spider's way of letting birds and bats and other animals
know that there's a web there because it takes them a long time to weave that web.
So that's a survival technique.
This old swap here is one of the largest
freshwater swamps in America too - it's about 40 miles from here to the other
end. It's about 25 miles across.
25 miles east to west, 40 miles north to south,
that means the swamp covers nearly 700 square miles. Bigger than the city of
Atlanta or Los Angeles. Most of the swamp now is a National Wildlife Refuge where
plants and animals are protected by the federal government. That means they can
live forever the way nature intended. In a vast ecosystem where every plant and
every animal has a purpose even snakes.
Are these poisonous snakes?
No they're not. These are constrictor snakes, we only
have three kinds of poisonous snakes here in South Georgia; the moccasin and
the rattlesnake and a coral snake. These are non poisonous. See the round eye? See
his eyes round? That tells us that he's a non poisonous snake. These animals catch
and eat things like rats, mice, squirrels, gophers, moles, baby rats, baby rabbits, any
kind of small thing that they can handle reasonably handle. Now in order to
swallow it, they have to open their mouth real wide. See? Because here in the corner
of their mouth, right here in the corner of their mouth, that right there they
have an extra bone in their mouth that allows their mouth to open like that and
then here in the bottom of their mouth their lower jaw bone, this bone down here?
They have two. You and I have one. So he can come so he can actually stretch out
two to three times larger than himself.
The Okefenokee may seem like a place
where only snakes and alligators can live but people have made this their
home for thousands of years. Native Americans were living here four thousand
years ago. The Timucuan were here when the first Europeans arrived. They were
followed by the Creeks and then the Seminoles who eventually
moved south to Florida and then in the mid-1800s scots-irish settlers arrived.
Why did they come to such a place? Bill Cribs can tell us. In the late 1800s
his great-grandfather came here to the Okefenokee and began to farm. Bill is a
professor of biology at Valdosta State University and today he's come back to
Billie's Island, a place where his grandparents had fun. With him is
Pete Griffin, a ranger at the Stephen C Foster State Park.
My great-grandfather
was Dan Lee, who settled this island in the late 1800's.
And all the people that settle down here in South Georgia in
those days were subsistence farmers. They literally grew everything that they ate.
There was no place to you know to go you couldn't run down to the local grocery
store because there weren't any grocery stores. There were no towns down here, no
roads. The land down here was fertile and all the people were healthy. In order to
get a cemetery started down here they had to kill a man and the only two
people that had ever been added to that cemetery since then was the Undertaker
and the medical doctor and they both starve to death. If somebody was going to
throw you out in the continental United States somewhere and a place where you
could survive with the least amount of effort, I'd say this swamp would probably
be the best place to be. You'd have plenty to eat and of course plenty to drink.
The swamp settlers had the place to themselves until the Hebard Lumber
Company bought land in the Okefenokee in 1901. They came to cut the huge cypress
trees and turned them into boards and shingles. Cypress wood is valuable
because it doesn't rot and it lasts a very long time. The workers came in and
the logs were shipped out on a railroad that cut right through the swamp.
It's kind of hard to believe this used to be part of a very powerful steam engine
that helped drag the Okefenokee logs to the old mill at Hebard Hill cause all
that's left of it here is part of the water tank.
There were so many people
working here that the Lumber Company built a town for them right here on
Billy's Island.
The town of Billy's Island was built in my great
grandfather's cornfield. If we could step back to the year about 1920 to 1925, it
would have been about 600 people living right here on Billy's Island. And by all
accounts Billy's Island was a pretty wild place
in those days. It had a doctor's office, it had a barber shop, and by the way
these were right next door to each other and so a lot of times you could be
sitting there getting your hair cut and you could see the blood running from the
doctor's office along the floor under the wall and into the barber shop.
Because a lot of people who got hurt with axes and saws and things in those
days had to have their limbs amputated and it had to be done right there in the
doctor's office.
It's hard to believe there was ever a town here. The lumber
company pulled out when the federal government bought the land in 1936
to make a national park. Now, only a few rusty machine parts are left. It's as if
the swamp was patiently waiting to reclaim the land. But some people believe
that the men who cut the giant cypress trees are still here. Their ghosts are in
the whispering trees. The workers used to sleep on platforms in the trees at night
to keep away from the snakes and the bears, only some men went up to their
platforms and never came down.
What would happen in the evening times after work, they'd all
climb up into somebody's individual platform, be like four or five guys, and
they'd sit there and they start playing cards and you know always in a game
there's a winner and there's going to be a loser, it just works that way. Well at
the end of the game, if the fella that lost didn't have enough money to pay the
man that he owed the money to that fella say, you know no problem, and they'd all
retires with their individual platforms and they'd go to sleep.
Well come about maybe three or four in the morning, the fella that had the money
owed to him would go find the fella that owed him the money, crawl over to his
platform, ease up to him and give him an extra
smile from ear to ear with a pocketknife, and then he ease back into his platform and
they'd all just get up the next morning go right back to work except for that
one poor soul that was up in the platform.
Listen, deep in the swamp and what people here called the whispering trees, you can
sometimes hear the ghosts of the murdered tree cutters. It doesn't have to
be twelve o'clock midnight, don't even have to be a full moon, but sometimes if
you listen off in the distance, you'll hear men yelling or shouting at each
other, chains rattling, and all it is are these poor souls that are working in
here trying to earn enough money to pay off their gambling debt so they can get
out of here.
The legends of the Okefenokee live on and the swamp has
recaptured its wild beauty. Now the Okefenokee is a state and national park
and it belongs to us all.
*Alligator Growl*
*End Screen Music*
There are still lots of places left to see in this state. There are still lots
of people I'd like you to meet. This is Georgia stories, I'm Colin Sidor.
Thanks.