American crocodile Florida Bay
— the older animal, the quieter one.
Not only on a wall.
American crocodile Florida Bay, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The American crocodile keeps to the brackish edge of Florida Bay, where the mangroves meet the salt. Lighter than an alligator, narrower in the snout, more shy. The Florida population was down to a few hundred in the 1970s and has climbed back into the low thousands. Most people who live in the Keys have never seen one. They move at night, and they prefer not to be noticed. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Florida Bay is the shallow estuary that lies between the southern tip of mainland Florida and the Florida Keys, almost entirely inside Everglades National Park. It covers roughly 1,000 square miles of seagrass flats, mangrove islets, and tidal creeks, with an average depth of about four feet. The bay is the northernmost place in the Americas where the American crocodile, Crocodylus acutus, regularly breeds. Most of the Florida population nests on remote keys in the bay and in the mangrove shoreline of Cape Sable, well away from public access points.
Unlike alligators, American crocodiles are coastal and salt-tolerant, and they tend to avoid people. Adults reach about ten to thirteen feet in Florida, smaller than the species runs in Central America. The snout is narrower than an alligator's and the fourth tooth on each side of the lower jaw shows when the mouth is closed. Most sightings in the Everglades happen at first light along the mangrove edge near Flamingo, or from a kayak in the back-country creeks. The animal is usually visible for a few seconds and then gone.
The Florida population fell to roughly 300 breeding adults in the mid-1970s and the species was listed as endangered in 1975. After decades of recovery work in the Everglades and at the Turkey Point cooling canals on Biscayne Bay, the Florida population was reclassified from endangered to threatened in 2007 and is now estimated at around 2,000 animals. Nesting runs from late April through July, with hatchlings emerging from sandy mounds along quiet mangrove keys. The recovery is one of the longer-running success stories in the southern parks.
