Highlands Hammock State Park

My 5-day-off period is in full swing. Wednesday I visited Highlands Hammock State Park (HH), an acclaimed unit within the state park system that I have long been looking forward to visiting.

As you may know, I like to print and carry with me an aerial of the place when I hike or bike or paddle. It is difficult to relate the trails on HH website's simple map to the Google Earth image of the park due to the dense hammock canopy. Nonetheless, the trails and their lengths are depicted on the park map:

http://tinyurl.com/c7t2j7

All the trails in the hammock proper are either paved drives



or are boardwalks and catwalks,



I slipped off the trails a little here and there.



To the north of the hammock forest lies a bike trail thru pine flatwoods habitat. Two, much rougher horse trails are depicted on the north side of the park map. I found a cross trail (logging road) connecting the north bike route with the next-north horse trail and rode it for awhile.

Few if any horses have been there lately so the trail is not all torn up and crapped out. This is where I got my real exercise for the day. The other trails could hardly be called exercise, 'cause I don't bike fast thru beautiful old growth hammock. I figure I hiked ~1.5 miles and biked another ~8.5 miles that day.

I pity the people in the family campground, as the park's main drag is unpaved and runs thru the middle of the campground. I suspect campers get a fair amount of road dust. Bad planning, that.

The “exit” sign located at the intersection of Park Loop Drive and CR 634 cannot be seen by drivers exiting the loop from the south. I got confused trying to exit and made a wrong turn, and had to go around the loop again, which was annoying. I saw other drivers pulling over and trying to figure that one out, too. This situation could be fixed by moving the sign.

It is such a beautiful place. I am surprised there were so few people wandering its trails. Perhaps a benefit of visiting on a weekday?

Ok, now let's get serious about exploration and adventure in and around HH. There are over 9000 acres owned within this park, yet only a fraction of that is open to the public via park facilities. Looking at the locale using Google Earth, you can see a lot more forestland around those facilities, with the implication that much (many? Most?) of it is also within park boundaries.



9000 acres of wild land to explore seems like a terrific opportunity for naturalists-in-exile, but you gotta know where the boundaries are. Nope, you cannot get a map of HH property boundaries from the Florida Parks website. Highlands County does not have an interactive GIS system, so you cannot get the boundaries from their property appraiser. Google Earth shows only 3800 acres of the park, as does my Florida Gazetteer. But surely some of that interesting forestland adjacent to park “boundaries” is publicly owned?

It would be nice to return to HH with a local naturalist that is very familiar with the place.

Back to Work :-(

I have been forced out of retirement by Bush's gang of deregulators and their smashing style of economic management. Thus ends 9.75 years of a slower and quite pleasant lifestyle. One good thing that came out of having to return suddenly to work, though, was the gratification of being immediately given about six months of interesting field work by friends in my line of work. Only one's health and family are more important than friends.

Since last November I have been conducting field surveys for imperiled species in preparation of a linear development project. Specifically, I have been looking for nests and significant habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis) and crested caracara (Polyborus plancus). The rcw work took me from the Florida Panhandle to southwest Alabama Nov '08 to Jan '09, and the caracara work has had me in Okeechobee, FL since then.

I moved my RV to Okeecbobee from Orange Lake for the duration of the caracara work. Once inside the RV with curtains drawn, I could be in Okeechobee or back in Orange Lake for all I know, or beside Lake Tanganyika for that matter. I get homesick living out of hotels on field trips and am hoping that living out of the RV will eliminate that threat. Plus, living in a new locale should allow for abundant new opportunities for adventure. Anyway, I'll be here until March or April, 2009.

I get up at 0515 hrs in order to be on site a little before daybreak, and am there until 1100 hrs; then I return to the field a few hours before sundown and remain there until about a half-hour after sunset. At each station I continuously scan the environment for caracaras using binoculars, and I mark down where they are seen and what their activity is. After doing this within the known range of a pair, we get an idea of the core portion of their territory. We then focus on locating the nest.

It is a good job for me at this time. I have no illusions about the difficulty in breaking back into “The Game.” I know it will be trying. But in the meantime I am out in the field at crepuscular times when wildlife, and especially bird life, is active and visible, I am in a new and interesting place yet still at home, the client and my boss treat me right, and I am making good money. I may be recently fleeced, but life is still good.

Hints that show the truth to the wise

A few years ago my herper friend Sleazeweasel opined that he was "not sure any snake is non-poisonous." Now, that was a novel idea to me, and thus was food for thought! My friend voraciously consumes herpetological literature, catches every snake if he can that he sees and photographs it, and travels around the world seeking wilderness adventures in some of the planet's most resplendent hotspots of biodiversity. Thus, I have learned to respect his opinions re serpents.

One anecdote that his statement prodded up from my gray sediments is about a blacksnake (Coluber constrictor priapus) and a southern leopard frog (Rana sphenocephala). I was delineating a wetland somewhere in north Florida when I heard a bleating sound behind me. A leopard frog was in the mouth of a blacksnake, the frog's body bent in ?agony, and the frog was screaming. The blacksnake dropped the frog to the ground at the very instant that the snake and I made eye contact, and quickly slithered off into the dense saw-palmettos (Serenoa repens), leaving the moribund frog behind.

The leopard frog was evidently dying and made no attempt to escape from me. I thought this was odd; blacksnakes are not supposed to be poisonous or constrictors (in spite of their scientific name), and the frog had not asphyxiated nor was it bleeding significantly. A few minutes later the frog ceased all movement and died. So what killed the frog?

Bryan Fry's work implies that SW was right and that the blacksnake may kill frogs with venom:
http://www.scienceinpublic.com/sciencenow/2003/bryan_fry.htm

A Bat and a Prayer

The following is a post made by a friend, Brian Houha, to a bulletin board we both belong to. Some might say these stories are only anecdotes, but I say that anecdotes are hints to the wise.

"Bird migrations through south Florida are at a peak right now. At about noon today, I was in the parking lot of the Pompano Harness Track when I saw six crows chasing after a small light brown winged creature that turned out to be a bat. The crows were much faster than the bat and as each was about to grab it with its beak, the bat dodged and weaved. Soon there were 12 crows after the bat. They took turns attacking the bat. But each time I thought the bat was a goner, the bat dropped and outmaneuvered the crow's closing lethal approach. Seconds after one crow missed, another was coming in for the kill. The slow moving bat continued to dodge their attacks. After a few minutes almost all of the crows lost interest and continued on their southern migration. The bat was closing in on some trees when I had to go. There was only one crow on his tail.

"It is rare to find bats in south Florida. I haven't seen one for about a decade. They are not fast fliers like birds and I can see that predation from birds was a major factor that led them to become nocturnal."

Brian Houha, January 13, 2009

Darwinian Cooters

Returning home from my daily morning walk to the post office about a month ago, I spied a female Peninsular Cooter (Pseudemys peninsularis) in a vacant lot about 250 meters from the edge of Orange Lake. She was accompanied by four Common Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos), three standing patiently beside her and the fourth in a tree. Unfortch, I didn't have my camera with me at the time.

Clearly, she was making a nest for the eggs she planned to lay, and the crows were hanging out waiting to see if they could snatch some eggs as they emerged from her cloaca. She had already dug the flask-shaped hole and may have been just about to lay the eggs when I came along. Ordinarily, I would have left them all alone with the forces of evolution, but this time my head swirled with thoughts:

"This turtle is too far from the water for the hatchlings to have a fighting chance to make it to water before predators spot them.

"Will the hatchlings even be able to find their way to the water in the first place? Mama can easily walk over lawn, but even clipped grass is taller than baby turtles, making it extremely difficult for them to walk through.

"The lady turtle has made a big mistake nesting in this spot. If I relocate her to a nesting site closer to the lake and safer, maybe I would be encouraging “bad genes” to survive and multiply? Perhaps I should leave it alone and let Darwinian evolution carry on? How else will turtles learn to cope with lawns and roads and an overpopulation of cats, crows and coyotes?

But NO!!! That is the wrong attitude. Humans have overpopulated the world and are driving down populations of many formerly common species. In the case of our freshwater turtles, we surround lakes with turtle killers (dogs, cats, lawnmowers, lawns, roads, cars, ...) and allow almost unlimited harvesting of what's left for export to China. Turtles need all the help they can get.

I carried the turtle back to my home and placed it where the soil is relatively soft, is well above the water table, and gets about a half-day of direct sunlight. I then placed her under a wood box having a wire covering and left her alone, hoping that she would make a new nest and lay her eggs under the relative safety of my watchful eyes and wood-and-wire box. Unfortunately, she lost the mood in the cage (duh) and didn't lay any eggs. Since I had to leave on an out-of-town field trip the next day, I released her on her own recognizance and hope she is doing well.

Chris' Rope Stand

Some outdoors folk like to rappel down or climb up ropes in their sport hobby; including mountain climbers, rock climbers and cavers. My friend Chris is none of these, but he does enjoy reading while sitting in the canopy of a tall tree, so he wanted to install a rope stand in his tallest loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) tree. Chris knew that I had experience setting up rope stands so he asked me to assist and I readily agreed. I love to see the exuberance in people when they first experience their own first rope stand. In the pics, Chris is the one with the ear-to-ear grin.

Chris used a bow-fishing rig to shoot a 40 lb test monofilament fishing line over the base of a 4-inch thick limb right in the thick of the canopy – perfect! We used the monofilament to pull an eighth-inch braided nylon line over the limb, and then used the eighth-inch line in turn to pull up a 9/16-inch (11 mm) nylon kernmantle static rope (PMI Pit Rope) up over the limb and back down to the ground. We tied off one end of the rope to an adjacent tree, and left the other end of the rope hanging relatively straight down for climbing and rapelling.

I climbed first as Chris has but little experience with SRT (single rope technique) gear. Several small branches and rotten limb stumps had to be removed on my way up the rope. Also, I had to maneuver among several limbs from subcanopy trees that the rope passed through. Upon reaching the limb crotch where the rope draped over, I used about 10 ft of 1-inch tubular webbing and a carabiner to hold the rope up off the tree limb. This “redirect” reduces damages to both tree and rope, and allows Chris to pull the rope down at night while replacing it with a leader line.

Chris had borrowed the bowfishing rig and was totally inexperienced at using it, but his first shot could not possibly have been any better. It passed over the same branch high in the canopy that we ultimately chose to use to anchor the rope. Talk about beginner's luck!

We did not have a measuring tape today to determine the distance between the ground and the anchor carabiner up in the tree, but based on the known length of the rope and how much was left over when rigged, I estimate the total height of the tree is possibly in excess of 120 ft, and the ground-to-canopy-anchor almost certainly in excess of 100 ft, perhaps 110 ft. That would make it the highest rope stand I have participated in constructing.

I then ran Chris through the basics of SRT, using a spare set of my gear on the rope just a few feet off the ground. He would use ascenders to climb a few feet up, then change over to descending gear and rappel a few feet down. He did this exercise twice, at which point I decided he was ready to climb to the canopy. About 50 ft up the rope, he admitted he was a little scared, but he continued on up anyway all the way to the canopy. He whooped and hollered upon attaining the canopy, definitely a happy canoper.

A Leo Humbled

A 12yo girl named Amber and her parents are neighbors of mine. One person gave her a monitor and another loaned her a computer, and she wanted to hook up to the internet. Being unsuccessful, the landlady suggested she come to me for help. I mostly acted as an advisor while Amber did all the shopping and wiring and softwaring, and finally succeeded in getting herself on line. Good for her! She's a smart and resourceful kid.

Her parents thought to do something nice for me in return, so they invited me to have dinner with them before I worked on their computer one evening. The meal was steak, baked potato with sour cream and salad with blue cheese dressing. How did they know blue cheese is my favorite? The steak was lean and tender and the potato was perfect. Yum! I gobbled it up!

Amber's dad growls and barks and swears at his wife, daughter and pit bull every time he speaks to them in front of me, and loudly, too. Of course, he was polite to me that evening, so I talked as soothingly as I could. During dinner, Amber's mom reminded “everyone” that they didn't have to eat everything on their plates. Nevertheless, it was late, I was very hungry and had spent a couple of hours on the project, so I cleaned my plate.

Being preoccupied with chatting and watching TV, and eating, I wasn't paying attention to what everyone else was dining on. As we finished our meal, Amber asked her dad if he had saved her any meat and he replied “Hell no!” It sounded to me like he said it, not with anger, but more like satisfaction. Puzzled, I looked around at Amber's and her mother's plates and realized they were not eating steak. Only Amber's dad and I had meat that night; they had served me her mother's steak. Possibly, Amber might not get meat with her meals on occasion. What I thought was her mom's platitude about not eating everything was actually a plea to share, and I had missed it. Amber and her mom would have had some meat with dinner had her father been more generous and I more alert.

They don't make much money. Amber's mom is a maid at the trailer park, and I suspect her dad works at minimum wage jobs too. I had forgotten what it is like to grow up so poor that dinner might be sparse and “uneven.” I am reminded of a pride of lions, where selfish alpha males eat first and only afterward are females and young allowed to feed on the leftovers.