Today as I was driving into work I heard that Florida once again registered large numbers of new residents – “Florida added 321697 residents in 2006”. At this rate we will be adding about three and a quarter million people to the state each new decade. This translates into approximately 1,300.000 new households (i.e., neighborhoods and rooftops and roads – figured at and average of 2.5 people per household). From a Florida wildlife and habitat protection perspective it means less and less open natural landscapes, fewer opportunities for wildfire dependent communities to thrive, greater and greater competition for surface and groundwater nourishment and many more roads and associated road kill and habitat fragmentation.

Florida has many of the same wildlife species as the rest of the nation but also has a mix of distinct species due to its geography as a peninsula that extends south inclusive of both temperate and subtropical climates. Our fauna represent a mix temperate and subtropical adapted species with a growing group of recent exotics that share and compete to sustain their kind with the growing human population. With our ever-greater abilities to reshape and manage natural landscapes we must accept the related responsibilities to be wise stewards of the land, water and the varied intertwined habitats.

This of course this is not news in Florida, it’s just that through the constant and incremental wildlife habitat loss brought about by each new resident, our wildlife are stressed and constrained more, more and a little more again. Species by species, there are limits to adaptability and their abilities to meet the habitat squeeze and loss. Our challenge is to move forward in the face of the continued population growth and craft a Florida where most, if not all, of our wildlife species can be sustained.

A cornerstone tool helping us craft a wildlife friendly Florida is, and hopefully will continue to be, the Florida Forever Program which has allowed us to identify and acquire from willing sellers land and water in sizeable tracts. Given the continuous population growth in the state though, development of other tools will be necessary. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservations Commission’s Wildlife Legacy Initiative accentuates this point and emphasizes that we must prevent wildlife not only from becoming threatened or endangered but we must craft strategies to keep common species common.

A tiered approach to this challenge is developing with large statewide and regional acquisition efforts at the top and many community and even citizen-based efforts below (such as the Florida Yards & Neighborhoods program, run by the University of Florida, and the National Wildlife Federation's Backyard Wildlife Habitat program.). In the middle are a variety of community-based efforts and tools such as:
• Local Community Master planning
• Envisioning/Creating new green infrastructure
• Linking regional parks, green grids and community forests
• Parks and natural green spaces acquisitions (existing and future)
• Greenway linkages (within the particular community and then outward)
• Street trees, canopy roads designations
• Transportation and Stormwater infrastructure examined planned and designed for Wildlife Integration/enhancement opportunities.
• Incorporation of private green areas (golf courses, botanical gardens, easements and set-asides).

From another perspective, the top level habitat protections efforts might be best view through efforts such as Florida Ecological Network Project and the original and hopefully a soon to be updated Closing the Gaps in Florida’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation System.

 

Lower tiered individual citizen-based efforts might highlighted by a variety of rural good land stewards programs [see: Rural, Agricultural and Silvacultural Lands (Wildlife as a part of our working landscapes)] and the more urban-suburban wildlife friendly yard programs mentioned above.

In the middle tier is the community (i.e., local governmental to large development and neighborhood level). This tier has been less fully defined and articulated relative to means or programs for sustaining wildlife and habitat, even though it is at this level where most of the development approvals are issued (see: Tools for Communities to Use in Wildlife and Habitat Planning). Over the next few years Florida has an opportunity to become a leader in this area as there is nothing like the pressure of a new development to challenge the creative juices. I hope we can rise to challenge.

PARROT COVE TO THE RESCUE!

You’re going to have visitors this fall. Lots of them! Some will stop briefly on their way through town. Others will stay for the entire winter. They’ll be tired and hungry and desperate for your hospitality.
You won’t have to cook or clean for them, or show them the sights. In fact, the only demand they’ll make on your time is if you choose to sit at your window and watch them.
They’re not mineral or vegetable; they’re smaller than a breadbox. They’re birds.
And you live right on their flyway . . . their migratory pathway between where they raise their families and where they go to spend the winter. They funnel through Florida by the hundreds of thousands, and a great many of them follow ancient, instinctive, patterns of travel utilizing the coast as a navigational aid, right through our Parrot Cove Neighborhood.
Many of the warblers, thrushes, orioles, tanagers, grosbeaks, hummingbirds, and other miniature migrants that pass through your yard have come from points as far north as Canada and the Arctic Circle, and the vast majority won’t settle in for the winter until they reach South America.
Up until just a hundred years ago or so, coastal Florida was a garden landscape of mangrove swamps and hammock forests that provided everything a weary traveler could as for . . . food, water, shelter. Parrot Cove is still a garden landscape with lovely trees and plantings and lawns. But without knowing the consequences, many of us have chosen trees, shrubs, and grasses for our yards that hail from beautiful, tropical lands in other parts of the world. The fact that they are not well adapted to our Florida soils and climate is an inconvenience that we know how to overcome by just applying some fertilizers and irrigation.
The fact that they are totally foreign to a native songbird’s digestive system is NOT something the birds can overcome. Just like a koala, whose digestive system can only derive nourishment from eucalyptus leaves, our tiny migrants can digest only those proteins for which they have matching digestive enzymes. They are unable to extract nutrients from the leaves, buds and berries of scarcely any of the plants we have chosen to grow in our yards (their flyway).
Imagine trying to take a long road trip, and all they provided at any gas station was bales of hay! Good fuel, but not for what you’re driving! Your yard is probably just the same . . .full of the plants that provide fuel for birds migrating through Polynesia or Southeast Asia, but not for the ones that live HERE!
To compound the problem, our choice of non-native landscape plants has also impacted the populations of insects the birds are equipped to digest. Bugs are high-protein foods for migrating birds, but the species the birds target are not to be found in non-native vegetation.
Now try to imagine a tiny Magnolia Warbler heading for the Tropics. He’s so tiny, you could mail him and his mate to California for the price of one stamp . . .and he’s got to put on enough fat to fuel his trip across the entire Caribbean Sea to South America. He finds endless acres of parking lots and rooftops and asphalt all along his traditional migratory route, and when he does find trees and shrubs, they are mostly ones he can’t eat, with bugs he can’t digest.
So who should come to the rescue? The good folks of Parrot Cove Neighborhood, that’s who! At our last Neighborhood gathering, the membership voted to establish a special tree-planting program to rebuild our hurricane-battered tree canopy . . .and the Tree Committee decided to place 100% of our emphasis on native species that are of special value to migratory birds!
In a nutshell, the Committee is working with a local native plant arborist, Carl Terwilliger, of Meadow Beauty Nursery, to obtain a varied selection of migratory bird-friendly trees for planting in Parrot Cove Neighborhood. Funds from the PCN treasury will pay for the trees, which will then be distributed to members to plant in their yards! Tree Committee members and the arborist will provide information about selecting and planting and caring for your tree(s), and neighbors will be on hand to help get the trees in the ground.
Not only will we be on the way to restoring our battered canopy, but at the same time we will be replacing it with the very trees our migratory birds count on for their survival! Yard by yard, our entire neighborhood will become a sanctuary (and re-fueling station) for wildlife in desperate need of our help. As we make our neighborhood a more beautiful place for ourselves, we will be embarking on a project with truly global conservation implications!