Alligator Lagoon - St. Augustine Alligator Farm, Florida, USA

Welcome to the alligator lagoon at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park on Anastasia Island in Florida, where this camera looks down over the swamp from the boardwalk. American alligators lie out on the sand bank and the concrete apron through the middle of the day, while others hang motionless in the shallows with just their eyes and nostrils breaking the surface. Count carefully, because there are usually more in the water than you first notice.

Alligators are cold-blooded, so the weather drives everything you see. On warm days they haul out to bask and barely move for hours. On cooler ones they stay in the water, which holds its temperature better. Florida runs four hours behind UTC in summer and five in winter. Look up into the trees between February and July and you may catch the other half of this place: a wild rookery of herons, egrets, ibis and roseate spoonbills that nest in the branches directly above the water, arriving from January and raising chicks through spring.

The farm opened in 1893, when two locals began collecting alligators at the end of an island tramway and found the reptiles drew more interest than the souvenir shop. It has run continuously ever since, moving to this seven-acre site after a fire, and is now an accredited zoological park and a listed historic district. In 1993 it became the only facility anywhere holding living examples of all 24 recognised crocodilian species.

Did You Know? The birds nesting overhead chose this spot deliberately. Wading birds seek out colonies above water patrolled by alligators, because raccoons and other nest raiders will not cross it. The chicks that fall are lost to the alligators below, but far fewer nests are raided than would be in a safer-looking tree, so the birds come out ahead. It is a bargain struck in the wild, and here it plays out above a boardwalk.

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