In a December 25, 2001 e-mail to the Disney Comics Mailing List, Don Rosa wrote:

"For the past 5 days I have been canoeing in the Everglades -- for anyone who doesn't know, that's the maze of mangrove islands at the SW tip of Florida, where you could canoe for a lifetime and never go through every channel and find every hidden lagoon or bay. We followed the marked maze of channels to various "chickees" (wooden decks built above the water where you can pitch a tent since there's actually no solid ground in the Everglades), but I also used a detailed map and wandered among many remote channels and lagoons which I could imagine have not been visited for years or centuries or since Tuesday. Sadly, even though you might imagine that the Everglades is like the place depicted in old movies and documentaries, it's nothing like that anymore. There are no billions of flamingos filling remote bays, or trees white with a thousand exotic birds which take flight en masse, or pools of manatees or bays choked with alligators or crocodiles, or anything like that. It's almost desolate. We never saw a fish in the water, no manatees, hardly any birds, and just a few alligators. Miami has pretty much wrecked the Everglades by siphoning off most of the water and polluting what was left. And when they opened a channel to the sea for powerboaters, the seawater killed the grasses that fed all those birds or the fish that fed the birds. The only think left is the mangove trees and the incredible maze they make. There could easily be a bay full of Barks' Gneezles back some sleepy little channel that has not been explored. And since it's impossible to travel overland (since the land is made of mangrove roots and trunks too thick to get through and offering nowhere to stand), if a lost civilization simply blocked the channel that lead to its bay of residence with some transplanted mangoves, no one would ever know they were there unless a low-flying helicopter chanced upon them for some odd reason. (But, they wouldn't last long, since the fish are too infected with mercury from Miami to be eaten safely.)"

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