Most of the time my Nikon wants to go to the Everglades. So I agree, and make the trip from a Miami suburb to a place where sloughs rife with wildlife and sound and myriad hues render a marvelous water world beneath canopies of Cypress and Spanish Moss and Pond Apple trees.

At first silence follows the shutting of my truck door and I stand and listen, strain ears into a summer hot and liquid - and hear nothing. I gather my gear and move into the swamp, am swallowed in its tangle and I become part of. That's when the music begins. Songbirds dressed in red and blue and black and yellow find the chords they'd abandoned when I entered, and then they continue. They flit in flurries of color and seem to tease sound itself in soprano, zipping from branch to branch; up through the canopy only to come sailing back down darting here and there as if to miss seeing something would end their world. A Great Blue Heron, a baritone that had refused spring migration may swoop in, squawk orders, and then disappear.

Nature - courtesy of The Creator