Pat’s Wildways: Okefenokee Swamp Park

It’s been years, maybe a couple of decades, since we visited the north entrance to the Okefenokee Swamp just south of Waycross, Georgia. Our memories of it were flavored by the repeated homage to the cartoon characters in the Pogo comic strip of long ago. Pogo the Possum’s famous quote was, “We have met the enemy and it is us,” fitting words still relevant today. When we last visited this place, Pogo-inspired memorabilia was scattered throughout the park, in a fun, kitschy way.

Well, things change. The Okefenokee Swamp Park is now operated by the same group that runs Okefenokee Adventures at the south entrance to the swamp near Folkston and, aside from a tableau of Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly’s studio, Pogo has been removed and both facilities are focused on wild nature.

That’s not to say there aren’t fun things to do in the Okefenokee Swamp Park, especially if you have a family with young kids. What kid doesn’t like a little train ride through a swamp park? And for more fun, there is a boat ride available too, but the boats looked small and crowded to our adult eyes and we passed on this opportunity.

We made the best of our short visit there anyway. We took the train, which seemed to be automatically driven, with a staff person talking on a microphone facing the passengers and no one in sight operating the train — an interesting twist on the self-driving cars now invading our roads. The 45 minute train ride included a 20-minute stop at “Pioneer Village,” where exhibits demonstrated life in the olden days. We spent some of that time talking to the staff person about the “cat-faced” pine trees, scarred from repeated sap extraction to make turpentine. Ever curious, I saw a glob of sap and touched it. What a mistake! I never knew before how difficult it is to get sticky pine sap off your hands!

Although Pogo and his friends were missing from the park, there were plenty of alligators, some dead, on display, and one large, very much alive lurking right by the boat ramp. Bucko and I had fun shooting photos of each other beside the 14-foot-long skeleton of Oscar, who died in 2007 of natural causes at an estimated age of nearly 100 years. During his long life, Oscar lived in the area surrounded by the park, with many admirers and no harmful incidents, a better mascot for the park than Pogo ever was. Another famed local large alligator, Old Roy, also lived in the park, getting along fine with Oscar until he too passed and is now a mounted specimen on display in another building. The live gator we saw was a large one too, hiding in the bankside vegetation near the boat dock. This one may not rival Oscar and Roy’s size but it was large enough to be intimidating for sure.

We noticed other natural things too. A yellow garden orb-weaver spider was guarding her stabilimentum in a place that was easy to focus on — my best spider photo yet! The canals were filled with blooming pond lilies and all along the train ride I photographed the flowering shrubs zooming by, until I finally got enough of a shot to use Google to identify it as a titi plant, a defining plant species in these swamps that provides nectar for bees and butterflies.

Bucko and I had an interesting time at the Okefenokee Swamp Park, but unless you have young children to occupy it is no better than the southern entrance near Folkston where the natural features are basically free. Admission to the park is about $25 and includes the train ride, and another $10 adds the boat tour. We adults have a much better experience just driving around the loop road and taking walks in the southern entrance of Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, closer to us in Folkston.

The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge encompasses 402,000 acres — the largest lowland freshwater peatland in the subtropics worldwide — and has recently been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If you have children, the privately owned Swamp Park near Waycross may be your speed. For adults, the National Wildlife Refuge may be the better choice. But everyone in our area should visit the Okefenokee Swamp in some way or another. It’s something to be proud of, right in our own backyard.

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com