Hi Florida Field Notes Explorers! — welcome. This is where November's story keeps going.
The first time I ever visited to Florida, I came on a girls' trip with a friend, and there was exactly one thing on my short list: I had to see a manatee.
I still don't fully know why they hold me the way they do. I think it's this — the very thing that makes them so endearing is the same thing that makes them so vulnerable. They're gentle because they have no other way to be. No claws, no speed, no real defense. Just enormous, unhurried, unbothered gentleness, moving through a world we've reshaped without asking them.
Here's the part that still stops me: some of these same slow, defenseless animals travel further than you'd ever expect. As far as Texas, some summers. As far as the Chesapeake Bay, on rare occasions — one manatee, nicknamed Chessie, kept returning to that same bay for years, hundreds of miles from home. No claws, no speed, nothing built for protection, and they make it anyway.
What's Actually Happening Right Now
Florida's manatee season officially begins November 15th, as manatees start leaving the open bays and rivers for water that holds steady at 72 degrees, no matter what's happening in the sky above it.
They're not built for what's coming. Despite their size, manatees carry only about an inch of body fat — nowhere near enough insulation to handle a Florida cold front in open water. Prolonged exposure below 68 degrees can bring on something called cold stress syndrome, which behaves in a manatee's body something like hypothermia does in ours. The warm water isn't a nice seasonal backdrop. It's the difference between surviving the winter and not.
A calf stays with its mother through most of this — up to two years, nursing and learning her routes, including, eventually, this one. I think about that fact more than almost any other this month, as a mother myself. There's a particular kind of tenacity in staying that close, that long, against odds you didn't choose and in a world you don’t have much control over. I think a lot of us know something about that.
Where to See Them This Month:
Blue Spring State Park (Orange City) — widely considered the best "no boat needed" manatee viewing in the state. A half-mile boardwalk runs the length of the spring run, and on the coldest days, hundreds of manatees have been counted here at once.
Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park (Homosassa) — home to an underwater observatory that puts you eye-level with the spring itself, plus a rehabilitation center for injured and recovering manatees.
Manatee Springs State Park (Chiefland, on the Suwannee River) — a quieter, less crowded option in Florida's Big Bend region, with a boardwalk over the spring run and clear water views of manatees moving between the spring and the river.
If you're in South Florida and a spring visit isn't practical, Manatee Lagoon in West Palm Beach is worth knowing about too — free admission, a boardwalk overlooking the Intracoastal, and a real, if unusual, warm-water refuge: the warmth here comes from a nearby power plant's outflow rather than a natural spring. It's where my own family goes most winters, and it's proof that even something built purely for human use can end up ‘mattering’ enormously to a creature that needs it.
Cold mornings, right after a front comes through, tend to bring the most manatees into view — the colder it is outside the water, the more reason they have to be inside it.
Ways to Bring This Home This Month
Feel seventy-two degrees. Fill a basin or a small tub with water at roughly that temperature and let your child put a hand in. Talk about how that same temperature that feels merely "cool" to us is the difference between life and danger for a manatee.
Measure an inch of fat. Cut a one-inch strip of felt or foam and let your child hold it against their arm. That's genuinely all the insulation a manatee has.
Draw the return route. On a simple map, mark a manatee's summer river and its winter spring, and the path between them. Talk about what it might mean to find your way back to the same exact place, year after year, with no map at all.
Practice patient watching. Manatees surface to breathe every few minutes and otherwise move slowly, low in the water. Set a timer for five quiet minutes — outside if you're near water, or even just watching a manatee cam online — and see what your child notices when the only job is to watch and wait.
Look up the life and adventures of ‘Chessie’. Chessie is the Manatee who would travel between Rhode Island and Florida every year, and on more than one occasion needed rescuing. We’re going to use our map of the USA to chart his journey, and all the places he visited on the way.
Fill in a page. If you're keeping your Wonder & Wander Nature Journal, this is the month for a "Wild Wonders I've Noticed" entry on your first manatee sighting — real, or one you watched together online.
I keep thinking about what it means to be the kind of creature that remembers its way home, gentle and defenseless the entire way. If you make it to a spring — or a lagoon — this month, I hope you get a quiet minute like that too.