DAVIE, Fla. – Justin Matthews was wearing desert sand colored camouflage pants and a beat-up straw cowboy hat.  Jacob Wierzbicki had on a pair of brown leather boots lined with Kevlar that he said cost him $400 and were 100…

Beyond the weathered boardwalk in the Everglades, an hour’s drive west of Miami, the sawgrass and cattails looked like a field of wheat, swaying in the light breeze. Bill Colantuono headed for the shade of a pavilion, gravel crunching under his boots. He talked about snakes. “Once,” he said, “I caught a 16-foot Burmese python.”

In the early evening, surfers take to the waters off the coast of Central Florida in places like Daytona and New Smyrna Beach. The skies are beautiful; the waves are good. But the waters can be treacherous. They are full…

Before the birds awake, Clyde Butcher slogs through the swamp of the Everglades. The mud pulls on his legs, he says, as if welcoming him to take root in a new home. He is a big, heavy man with a…

Under brilliant early-morning sun, colorful shore birds, often solitary, tiptoe on steady, twig-like legs through mere inches of sparkling water along the Southwest coast of Florida. This photo slide show documents a wide variety of hungry birds from Fort Myers…