Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary leaves a lasting mark on many who visit. Andrea Rousseau is a Cape Coral resident who returned to college late in her forties in 2024. While pursuing her degree in digital art and multimedia production, her humanities class allowed her to combine her love of both art and nature in some of her assignments, including one that challenged her to tell a story through a series of photographs.
The photographs she used in this assignment are just a few of the thousands she has taken during her many strolls on the boardwalk at the Sanctuary. She received tremendously positive feedback from her professor on this assignment who encouraged her to share her work with us, something she had not dared to do until recently.
"The Sanctuary holds a special place in my heart and is a place I feel must be protected," says Rousseau, who has been a Corkscrew member for several years.
Below please find a portion of her assignment and a selection of her beautiful photos.
Song of the Swamp: The unknown, hidden beauty within Florida’s Everglades
Typically, when people think of Florida, two things come to mind: Disney World and the beach. But as I have told anyone who will listen, Florida is so much more than sand and theme parks filled with tourists. There is a Florida that is unknown to many, one that I consider the real Florida and contains natural, untold beauty. This Florida that I wish everyone knew is that same Florida that early land barons tried to erase—specifically, the western portion now known as the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, located in rural Collier County.
Like many other nature lovers, when I first began to kindle my interest in photography I gravitated to sunsets and sunrises. After all, why not look to the magical colors of a sunset sky for that raw beauty in nature? No two sunsets are ever the same, even when seen from the same vantage point. But as my love for photography grew, along with my skills, so did my desire to photograph more variety and to see more natural beauty within my state. This desire, along with an invitation from my nature-loving friends, led me to the swamp where photograph I did, on a grandiose scale, as often as possible. But for me to continue to do so, it must continue to be preserved. While the National Audubon Society stepped in to work with the local community to protect the swamp in 1954, it isn't necessarily "safe."
Read about the Sanctuary's 70-year history here.
“Corkscrew,” or just “the Swamp” as my friends and I affectionately refer to the area, is one of our favorite places to take nature walks. We hold annual memberships that help provide financial assistance towards the maintenance and conservation needed to protect this land. We do this because we believe that conservation is instrumental and necessary for the preservation of life on earth and that much more needs to be done to protect wildlife and their habitats.
The Corkscrew Swamp ecosystem is home to a long list of creatures including waterfowl, barred owls, opossums, raccoons, pig frogs, and of course alligators. There are hundreds of different species of flora including rare, native, and endangered orchids. One of these rare orchids is the world-renowned “super” ghost orchid, a rare flowering plant that relies on sensitive wetland habitats and is known to be found only in South Florida and Cuba. We can’t forget the insects like the green stink bug, great pondhawk dragonflies, and my personal favorites – ruddy daggerwings, gulf fritillaries, and Florida’s state butterfly, the zebra longwing, which all play significant roles both as pollinators as well as food sources for other animals.
Our annual membership fees may only be a drop in the bucket for conservation, but those drops, combined with drops from others, ultimately help protect this natural beauty of Florida. Cypress swamps are not only wildlife habitats, but they perform functions most people don't realize, including stormwater recycling, flood control, groundwater recharge, and more. To protect these wetland habitats, we must understand and respect how each species lives together and thrives within their ecosystems, as well as how human influences can have detrimental effects on not only the wildlife living there, but the land, the water, and humans themselves—full circle. In a world where technology prevails, we must always remember to protect our Earth. It is all too easy to give in to the ease of technology but that progress comes at a grave price. These old-growth cypress forests are being forgotten. The only way to keep this beauty from continuing to be destroyed is to bring it to the attention of those who do not know it exists so that we can all help protect what is left.
