Dean &
Ginny's excellent adventures... Main
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Florida--02/11: Part 1 Part
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 Because
I'd donated 50% of my book's royalties to the Nature Conservancy of
Florida, Erica La Spada, a donor coordinator there, had
invited us to a private guided tour of the Disney Wilderness
Preserve south of Orlando in Kissimmee.
Wow! We were impressed
with the size (12,000 acres) and with what the Conservancy has done
to restore the property from ranchland back to its original status
according to the records from the first Spanish missionaries.
At the edge between the grasslands and an
oak/cypress hammock, a lone longleaf pine rises majestically above
the grasses. >>
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This site began as a mitigation site to offset the
land that was used in the making and expansion of Disney World.
To us, this refurbished "Real Florida" is
far more interesting than the totally artificial environment in the
theme parks. Here's a link to The
Nature Conservancy's website for this property.
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Even the Nature Conservancy buildings are built with many
green features. >>
For the general public there are several hiking trails,
but we traveled in a hybrid 4-wheel drive truck around to areas that most
folks don't get to see. Great fun...
We started our tour at Lake Russell, one of the last
undeveloped lakes in Florida. This area is part of the headwaters for The
Everglades, which is one of the reasons the Conservancy was so interested
in managing this site.
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At the edge of the lake, the bald cypress knees arising from the wet
ground and buttressed
trunks provide an interesting shoreline.
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 Then
we went to an open area where the scrub jays live. There are several
groups of jays in the park and Dan, our driver was certain that he
could entice some jays out into the open. He made some
noises and walked out to a feeding platform and pretended to put
some food out. We waited for several minutes and he was
about to give up on them when suddenly a group of six jays flitted
over to see what we were doing.
 Scrub
jays are endangered and endemic to Florida and are threatened
primarily because of loss of habitat--wild grassy areas with
frequent fires to keep the forests open and grassy.
Here's more information about the jays on Wikipedia
and in this interesting Cornell Lab of Ornithology article: Scrubland
Survivors.
When Dean lived in Florida before in Melbourne
Beach, he had some scrub jays tame enough to hand feed them.
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We were surprised to learn of the running oak that spreads
across the ground as a groundcover. It is the very
un-oak-like green groundcover between the grasses and palmettos in
the photo below, but when you look at it close up, though, it does
look like a very small oak. It produces a lot of small
acorns, which the scrub jays favor.
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Most of the time the resurrection ferns are
dried and brown, but because of recent rain storms
the ferns
were bright green. >>
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<< We
then entered an oak hammock with its graceful old live oaks
festooned with Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. 
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This hammock is home to some rare big-eared bats, which live in
the abandoned trailer (leftover from the ranch). The Conservancy
has built this cute new barn red bat habitat, but the bats have
not moved in yet. They better hurry before the old trailer with
its green roof collapses.
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After the oak hammock, we went out to the great marsh. Lots of birds
love this wetland. Many acres of march had been drained by the
ranchers. They'd dug ditches, which effectively wiped out all this
marshy area. One of the first things the
Conservancy did when they took over the land was to fill in the
ditches.
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On to more areas in the
Disney Preserve >>
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