‘Dry to the bone’: Drought squeezes Everglades airboat operators

Miami Herald, March 16, 2026

Extreme drought in the Everglades dries out airboat path. Photo by The Everglades Foundation.

The following is an excerpt from a Miami Herald article. Click here or click the link at the end of this blog to view the entire article.

Instead of whizzing through the open marsh of the Everglades like he usually does, Tristan Tigertail steers his airboat alongside the man-made canal along Tamiami Trail.

On one side, cars speed past on the two-lane road that bisects the southern part of the state. A telecommunications tower looms above the landscape. On the other, shrubs, marsh grasses and tree islands stretch out toward the vast field.

Tigertail, 36, who captains airboat tours through the Everglades, is navigating his boat through the only route available given how dry the park has gotten this year. This is the driest he’s seen the Everglades in a decade and the first time since the family business opened about 30 years ago that this canal is the only viable route.

But if he doesn’t take his boat down the canal, Tigertail Airboat Tours would be forced to shut down like some of the other airboat operators that line the road. The Herald spoke with half a dozen operators. Many had to stop tours temporarily because of the drought or reroute their tours to the canal, though a few operators on the southern side of Tamiami Trail said that their area still has enough water to reach the greater Everglades.

“We might not have reprieve until we have rain which could come in May or could come in September,” Tigertail said. “This is an abnormal drought.”

Airboat trails that once looked like shallow rivers now resemble beaten-down walking paths. The tall sawgrass has an ombre of brown and gold at its tips. Limestone juts out of the ground with water pooled in its small crevices, making it too dangerous to even attempt to navigate an airboat there.

Aerial view of extreme drought in the Everglades. Photo by The Everglades Foundation.

With the last pools of water drying up, gar, killifish and mosquito fish that manage to cross scattered puddles have been pushed to the edges of the swamp, where they congregate. Anhingas dive into the water like seals to feed on them.

An animal rehabilitation center on a tree island that Tigertail would normally bring tourists to is unreachable by airboat now. Before it got too dry, he said they had to bring all the gators and turtles housed there back to the main reservation site.

There are still plenty of wildlife sightings from the canal, gators sprawled out across the limestone and countless eyes peek out of the tea-colored water. Tigertail said he’s been seeing more wildlife in the canal as the drought worsens. In a man-made basin carved out along the canal, small minnows darting in the water look like raindrops as juvenile gators, less than a year old, snap them up.

Robin Sinclair, a visiting snowbird from Canada, said the tour was great but “a shame you can’t go in and really see its beauty.”

Tours can only run in the evenings because the Miccosukee use the canal for other operations during the day. The channel is narrow, forcing drivers to coordinate with other boats and dodge bumping limestone when the boat stops.

Curtis Osceola, the chief operations officer of the Miccosukee Tribe, said they were taking the opportunity during the dry down to rehabilitate the tree islands that were historically drowning during the wet season, to hopefully get mammals like deer and bear to come back.

“This is very, very dry relative to what we normally see,” Osceola said.

Shades of brown

The extreme drought conditions didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of more than a year of drier-than-average conditions, and climate change is expected to make droughts like this even more extreme.

This year water levels in Everglades National Park are more than six inches lower than last year and over a foot lower than the year before that, the Everglades Foundation reported. Meteorologists are calling it the driest drought Florida has seen in 25 years.

The few scattered storms are a welcome help, but won’t make the difference needed — experts say it would take at least a foot of rain in the next month for things to begin improving.

Steve Davis, chief scientist at the Everglades Foundation, took a Miami Herald reporter in a small airplane over the wetlands last week.

Much of the landscape was shades of brown. The deepest marshes were barely visible from 10,000 feet.

“Wow, this is just dry to the bone out here,” Davis said. “Even during a normal dry year, you don’t see these conditions until April.”

But just beyond the marsh, just south Lake Okeechobee where the Everglades meets the neatly lined fields of the agricultural zone, which is mostly sugar farms, the landscape got greener.

Read the full Miami Herald article here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/climate-change/article314912823.html

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