A Sight to Behold
From a tape-recorded interview with Lake Seminole legendary fishing guide Jack Wingate.
I saw five eagles diving in a school of coots out on the lake. Five bald eagles working on one raft of coots. It’s a sight to behold. Made them coots a nervous wreck, I’m 
tellin’ you. We got probably 200 osprey nests here, and I’ll venture to say that in the Lake Seminole area there’s 100 bald eagle nests. Unbelievable. There’s an osprey to your left now. He’s fishing. He’s fixin’ to catch him something. We got the great blue heron, just loads of them, and the little blue heron. I remember one time there was four photographers, each one loaded with cameras, got out of their cars and was about to jump over one another to get shots of the blue heron sittin’ around the basin there. The white egret, the crooked beak ibis, the wood stork. Wood storks migrate but they have certain places they come back to every year. This lake probably is sitting in one of the best wild turkey areas there is in our part of the world. You could come into this basin we’re sittin’ in right here a month ago you would hear turkeys gobblin’. They were strutting and looking for mates. The great fox squirrel. He feeds on the seed of the pine tree. They’re rare. Beautiful, too. You got deer. Bear is just about gone. A few wild hogs is left. We got the black panthers still here. The bob cat is here. The long tail cat is here–somewhat of a cougar. He’s still here. Alligators. Some of the biggest alligators you’ve ever seen in your life. I’ve got a picture of one they killed back down here. Over ten feet long. Weighed 700 pounds. The lake is full of fresh water shrimp. I was seein’ ‘em pop the water there just then but I don’t see ‘em right now. In this big lime sink we’re coming to you see the snails on the bottom. There, the little black pods there. That’s what the shell cracker eats on. There’s 250 islands in the lake. Wildlife everywhere on those islands. This is one of my favorite places. This is called Silver Lake Run. International Paper owns everything around us here. They raise pine trees. And what I was showing you a while ago on that island is government land and there’s no reason for them to ever cut that on that island. If they let it grow 50 more years, you’ll see a stand of timber very similar to what it was when the settlers first came into this country. The illustration of Jack Wingate, above, is by Columbus, Georgia, artist, Garry Pound.