Bears

Aw shucks. Here at home, with boundaries with Everglades NP, Big Cypress Natl Preserve, Collier Seminole SP and 10,000 Islands Wildlife Preserve, we see black bear at least bi weekly and have bear scat on the street, driveways and sidewalks more often than not. On the other side of our sidewalk is one of the many wooded strands of Everglades National Park. Probably 3 or 4 evenings a week, a pair and sometimes 3, of coyote amble down the sidewalk before heading behind the pond into the woods. Any and every nite, if you go outside you are heralded with a chorus of howls from them and sometimes they are so loud that it's quite easy to hear them inside as well.

And then there are alligators - every day. See one sunning on the lawn at least weekly and they are always cruising the basin. Driving in to Naples to shop or to Everglades City on a sunny day, it's pretty easy to count 50 gators sunning themselves on the canal banks. Have only seen a python once but it was across a whole lane plus shoulder of US 41/Tamiami Trail on my way home.

Deer abound as do manatee (which on a quiet evening with my lanai doors open, I can hear frolicking in the basin). Eagles, osprey, commorants (anhingas), great white and blue herons, egrets. Nature's paradise.