The Everglades are drowning.

Canals along Alligator Alley have spilled over banks into roadside swales. Deer have been driven from flooded-out tree islands to strips of dry ground -- mostly canal levees, but a few have even been spotted on the porches of empty hunting cabins.

And the water, already near a record high, is still creeping up -- particularly in the area of deepest concern: the sprawling sawgrass prairies north of Tamiami Trail. If the water doesn't recede fast, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission warns deer and other denizens could die in potentially large numbers.

''If we don't start doing something, we're going to end up with a total massacre,'' said wildlife Commissioner Ron Bergeron, who took U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, on an airboat trip Tuesday into the 700,000-acre conservation area west of suburban Miami-Dade and Broward counties, a marsh hammered by high waters over the decades.

Similar conditions decimated the Glades' white-tailed deer in 1982 and 1995, knocking the herd from thousands to hundreds, and killed countless smaller animals that rely on high, dry tree islands for food and shelter.

Those tree islands are anything but high and dry now.

About five miles south of Alligator Alley, Bergeron slowed his airboat near a small tree island, where months earlier he'd spotted a buck.

The island used to have a landmark rock outcropping.

''That crop rock shot up three to four feet there,'' he said. ``It's under water now.''

HIGH FOR SIX WEEKS

It's not the water depth -- which ought to range from six to 18 inches depending on location -- that presents the biggest problem; it's duration. With the water up since Tropical Storm Fay six weeks ago, wildlife managers figure they've got 30 days before the toll starts mounting.

State and federal water managers, working with an outmoded and overwhelmed flood-control system and sometimes conflicting regulations to protect suburbs, farms, the Glades and the nests of an endangered bird from flooding, say there is not much more they can do -- at least until the long-delayed overhaul of the Tamiami Trail and other Everglades projects move forward.

`MAXIMIZING'

''Right now, we're maximizing all our releases to alleviate the high waters,'' said Andrew Geller, a senior engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

That's not an answer that sits well with Bergeron, a prominent road builder and self-described ''cracker'' who has spent much of his life fishing and hunting in the Everglades.

For weeks, he has been calling state and federal agencies to press for relief -- both immediate emergency action and long-term fixes.

The worst flooding is north of Tamiami Trail, a historic road that is the dividing line, and major cause, of much of the damage. The road dams up and drowns marshes to the north and dries out Everglades National Park to the south.

''You've got a desert on one side and a reservoir on the other,'' Bergeron said.

Bergeron said he aims to be an ''ambassador'' to get the warring factions of the Everglades -- environmentalists, the Miccosukee Tribe, local, state and federal agencies -- together to break the gridlock surrounding both Tamiami Trail and a small endangered bird called the Cape Sable Seaside sparrow. It's a tall order: The parties have been arguing for a decade.

Work to fix the road has been tied up for 19 years. Last month, the National Research Council dubbed the project ``one of the most discouraging stories in Everglades restoration.''

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