Southwest Florida bird photography (page 10)
Swamp Loop road off highway 41 west of Shark Bay

This loop road takes you through some very dense swamp country. It is a dirt road off the south side of Highway 41 about another 10 miles east past the junction for Turner River road.  As you are driving down the highway you will see it is just to the right of a dilapidated building on the south side. This road heads south for about 10 miles and then bends to the east, ending back on highway 41 about 25 miles later.  At the entrance you will see a sign that the road is closed to non-local traffic.  After ignoring this, we continued down the road.  It is a relatively rough, strewn with big puddles that can go about a foot deep.  We were able to make it through in our rental sedan with no problem, but hit the car wash later in the trip based on the amount of mud we picked up on this route.  Given the roughness of the road, the max speed was about 10-15 mph, taking about 3 hours to complete the loop.  If there have been more recent rains, then I would not advise this road unless you have higher ground clearance and 4WD.

While driving on this road, you need to pay careful attention to wildlife in the adjacent swamps when you see some significant enough clearings.  Sometimes, getting out of the car and simply walking along the roads edge silently to minimize disturbance of the wildlife seemed to work well.  We found some pretty good locations where the south bound loop road makes the bend to the left toward the east.  At this bend, there are some nice opens areas of the swamp allowing some clearer views of the birds in this area.  The species tend to be the same as that found on Turner road, but are trickier to photograph due to the density of the foliage.

I also found the area conducive to landscape related photography. Some of the flooded cypress swamp land here tends to be very photogenic. For this, you ideally want to be here under more subdued light (morning, evening, or cloudy weather) in order to minimize the contrast of the shadows.  One of the famous photographers of the Florida cypress swamps, Clyde Butcher has a studio nearby that you can visit to get some appreciation of some of the artistic images of this area.