Dry Tortugas

The next one is Biscayne National Park, which is 95% water.

We also have Dry Tortugas, which is one of the most remote parks.

It's 70 miles west of Key West, and that is 99% water.

And then, like I just mentioned, we have Big Cypress National Preserve.

Lulu Vilas joins us.

She's executive director of the Friends group that covers all four of these parks.

Lulu, talk about Dry Tortugas.

Is that how you say it? Dry Tortugas National Park?

It's an hour and a half away from Orlando, so it's easy to tack on to an Orlando trip or just make it its own trip as well.

I love the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Key West.

I love all of our springs.

So, you know, if you go to Crystal River, you'll go to our springs, but we have springs all throughout Central and North Florida.

We'll come here again for a full week and then get serious on some of those species.

It'd be fun to get down south, eventually get clear down and out to the Dry Tortugas, but this is a good first birding in Florida for more than just a couple hours.

I did like four years ago, was quickly, had one night in Tallahassee- I've told this story before so went out quickly and in the evening I got a my lifer Limpkin and then the next morning ran out quickly and got Red-cockaded Woodpecker and Bachman's Sparrow just a it was a gorgeous morning out in some sand dunes and open not sand dunes but sandy areas open pines got three incredible lifers in Florida a few years ago so didn't get any lifers today but I'll get I'll get a lot more eventually hope everyone's having a great day out there bye-bye I did have an interesting little encounter as we were leaving Fort DeSoto State Park.

As is usually the case, we're running off to do something else.

Um, I'm Todd Santoro, and I am a software engineer and an entrepreneur, and, uh, I built a tool to, in order to get seats on a very limited ferry to a national park.

It's the most remote national park in the system, and the name of the company is called Dry Tortugas Alerts.

Um, you can find it at drytortugas.alerts.com. And again, it's simple.

It's a simple tool where people can, uh, search for sold-out dates, um, and then purchase a, an alert via text message.

Um, somebody else out there has also kind of, um, caught on to this sort of limited, um, uh, seat type of thing, and so they do it with camping sites.

And so they will let people know, uh, via alert when a campsite opens up.

Because again, camping down here in the Keys, uh, there's some of the most beautiful oceanfront campgrounds in the world, and, uh, again, they, they sell out quick, and so people are looking for this alert type of, uh, system, and so we built it for the Dry Tortugas.

That's crazy.