American Amazon

An ancient bastion of life anchored in place by two-thousand-year-old cypress trees. A labyrinth of flooded forests and pulsing arteries. A place buzzing with new stories: from the mass migration of the world’s only social raptor, the swallow-tailed kite, to the dazzling spectacle of the ghost orchid and its surprising nocturnal pollinators. Here, in the wet and wild American South, among the last stands of cypress, tupelo, strap ferns, pitcher plants, and epiphytes, is what E.O. Wilson called “America’s Amazon” – a hotspot of biodiversity rivaling anywhere on Earth – and yet somehow its story has never been told