The crackles sound like a hundred barrels of corn pop-pop-popping as flames engulf clump after clump of sawgrass. Gray-black smoke billows into an almost cloudless sky. The heat, even at 20 yards, is nearly enough to burn the hair on your arm.
Water is just ankle-deep where the flames hopscotch across nearly two square miles of sawgrass prairies in far western Broward County. Only a year ago, water here would have lapped at your waist."We need to burn whenever the water levels allow us to," said Steve Coughlin, who supervises a Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission crew setting the fires. "We haven't been able to burn for two years."
The fire is only the most obvious sign that the Everglades, after being pounded by record floods, is on the rebound. But there are lingering effects, too, including the deaths of decades-old trees and the apparent extinction of a key population of an endangered sparrow.
The Everglades requires periodic fires to stay healthy, but the flooding held the flames mostly in check for several years.
Using what looks like a miniature flamethrower mounted on a cane pole, game commission staffers sought to replicate a task nature once performed. Lightning-set fires have shaped the Ever-glades for millennia, thinning out the sawgrass, allowing different plants to thrive and recycling nutrients into the soil.
"It makes the area more productive," Coughlin said. "Wading birds can come in and use this area now, and reptiles, too."
Before people sliced and diced the Everglades with roads and canals, fires like this would sweep through frequently, clearing huge swaths.
Now, though, the highways and dams box in the natural fires. So the state crew tries to burn 10,000 to 15,000 acres each year to help out nature.
In the next few months, scientists will get a better picture of how well the Everglades is bouncing back from the flooding, but already there are signs that the watery wilderness is on the mend.
"We're having a relatively normal drydown for the first time since '94," said Tom Armentano, chief of the biological resources branch of Everglades National Park. "The question is, how quickly does the (animal) population build back up?"
Everglades animals are used to - in fact, are dependent on - an annual wet season from about June to November, and a dry season from about December to May.
For example, as the waters recede into isolated pools in the winter, fish are concentrated. This makes for easy pickings for the Everglades' long-legged wading birds. Sensing the bounty, they build nests and have babies. Their line continues.
But in 1994 and 1995, no such drying occurred. This was due in part to unseasonal rains, but another important factor was the latticework of drainage canals that crisscross the marsh, disrupting natural water flows.
In some ways, the flooding was beneficial. On average, the Everglades has been overdrained for several decades, compared to its natural condition.
"We're not getting wet enough conditions in the normal years. We're only getting them in the wettest," said Bob Johnson, research director at Everglades National Park.
The extraordinary amount of water dumped on the wilderness in 1994 and 1995 allowed fish - a key link in the food chain - to rebound.
"The birds are starting to nest and we see a good fish population," said Burkett Neely, manager of the Arthur R. Marshall Lox-a-hat-chee National Wildlife Refuge in Palm Beach County. "Fishermen are catching a lot of fish, so that's a sign to me that the marsh is healthy."
At the other end of the Everglades, the flooding delivered something like a normal amount of water to Florida Bay. The bay, starved for fresh water under normal circumstances because of the canal system, has grown supersalty in recent years and was periodically fouled by explosions of putrid algae.
"Florida Bay looks pretty nice," said Ron Jones, a Florida International University researcher. "The bay isn't 100 percent, but it's better than it was. And if we have another wet year, my prediction is it will continue to improve further."
An emerging restoration plan for the Everglades calls for much more fresh water to be sent into the brackish bay.
"We didn't do this. God did this," Jones said. "But it shows us that if you build it, they will come. It's the bay of dreams."
For many animals, though, the flooding was disastrous. Estimates of the number of deer and other mammals killed in 1994 and 1995 were as high as 90 percent in the western Broward Everglades.
A few deer survived, though, mostly by heading west to higher ground. Others hung out around the big earthen dams that hem in the once-free-flowing River of Grass.
Now, a few deer have waded out through the ankle-deep water to reoccupy some of the raised hammock islands that dot the `Glades of western Broward. Some have even borne fawns, the first in three years.
But it will probably be a long time before most animals return. Mice, rabbits, raccoons and the like can't even make their way through the ankle-deep water. Until drought strikes again, completely parching the 'Glades, they will remain isolated in a few pockets.
Another flooding casualty was the Liguus tree snails that inhabit the Everglades islands. Each island produces a unique pattern of color on these brilliantly colored, multihued snails. In the fall, as the summer rainy season subsides, they lay their eggs at the base of trees on the islands.
But with most islands flooded out for two years, they could not reproduce. Since they live only about five years, that is bound to set them back, said Deborah Jansen of the Big Cypress National Preserve.
Even worse off is the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, an endangered species. Going into the flooding, two groups existed. One lived around the western border of Everglades National Park, the other near the eastern border.
The sparrows live only two years - "they live fast and die young," Johnson jokes - and they require a specific kind of place to nest: tufts of grass in a plain where water drops below one foot, and where they have a clear view of approaching predators.
In the modern Everglades, with its water flows disrupted, the sparrow has become known as "the Goldilocks bird." "It's either too wet or too dry," Johnson explains.
So much water covered the areas where the western population nests for the past two years that almost none remain. The older ones have died off without reproducing. When scientists went out recently to look in the bird's favorite haunts, they found only five left. Now they are checking nearby areas, to see if maybe the western sparrows have moved. Another big flooding casualty was the trees of the Everglades. In Big Cypress, some 30 acres of pines were drowned. Meanwhile, in western Broward, the high water killed many tropical hardwoods such as mahogany, gumbo limo and paradise tree, which once shaded the islands. Some of these were 80 years old, or even older.
Rejiggering the plumbing system that has wreaked such havoc is a must, scientists say. But when you look at a place where the game commission burn crew visited just a few weeks ago, the marsh's ability to rejuvenate itself is plain. Green shoots half a foot tall already have shot up from the blackened sawgrass, mixing with new shoots of pickerelweed and blueflag to create a green expanse atop the black. Says a hopeful Coughlin: "Maybe we'll get back to a normal cycle now."