The Trailblazer

  This year the festival will be held from October  17  through October  20  at the Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission (FWC) Suncoast Youth Conservation Center at  6650 Dickman Rd, Apollo Beach, FL.  F ield trips and hikes will be held nearby at Lower Green Swamp, Cockroach Bay, Blackwater Creek, and Fred and Ida Shultz Nature Preserves as well as Upper Tampa Bay Conservation Park and many other wild locations! The festival is timed just right to coincide with the peak migration of more than 180 species of birds and features expert-led field and boating trips to the best wildlife sites in West Central Florida.  The festival will  also  offer two days of live seminars featuring talks on sea urchins, dolphins, Florida butterflies, the sandhill crane, the ivory billed woodpecker, sawfish, penguins, turtles, and so much more!  There will be two  keynote speakers .   Stan Tekiela will speak on the mysteries and magic of bir...

  Whether you go hiking, riding, bird watching or kayaking in our conservation parks, you may not have had the opportunity to speak with our staff. More than 140 staff members staff and manage Hillsborough County's Conservation Parks and Nature Preserves, which are spread out throughout our county. This is an opportunity to meet and learn about the people who work hard to keep the County's conservation parks and nature preserves thriving and beautiful for all to enjoy. Our staff do everything from mowing and fence construction to prescribed fire, invasive species removal, ecological restoration, guided programs and more! Just a walk from the Tampa Executive Airport is a park that’s just a little different from the rest. Eureka Springs Conservation Park stands out from our other parks and preserves because of its botanical gardens, stunning orchids, and rich history – a history one of our Park Rangers has seen bloom for nearly 35 years. Eureka Springs' original sign, which...

Attention, nature enthusiasts of all ages! Did you know that many of our feathered friends face a housing shortage? That's correct – many birds, referred to as "cavity nesters," rely on holes or cavities in trees for nesting. The best place to find these homes is in dead trees, known as snags, which can be hard to find. An owl pokes their head out of a palm trunk. Photographed by Hari K Patibanda under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. In our Nature Preserves and Conservation parks, you might see many dead trees out in the forest. Do you think your neighborhood has as many? How many snags can you count on your street? Unfortunately, snags are usually completely removed in neighborhoods because it looks better, but birds need them! Woodpeckers hollow out cavities in these old trees, and those holes provide a secure place for birds of many species to nurture their young. A snag near the street. Leaving some of the tree behind like this can benefit woodpe...

Some of the most distinctive beneficiaries of the existence of snags, or standing dead trees, are the woodpeckers. These enigmatic birds, though frequently observed in tree-laden neighborhoods of Hillsborough County, are remarkably unique in terms of their lifestyle and anatomy; these birds are tied inexorably to the trees they inhabit to a degree unparalleled in the avian world. Pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) at Lake Dan Nature Preserve. In Hillsborough County, the staccato, rapid-fire tapping of the red-bellied woodpecker ( Melanerpes carolinus ) is a familiar sound. This rhythmic hammering could signify an array of activities. For instance, they could be excavating a nest, using their powerful beaks as precise drills to unearth hidden insect prey, or the percussive drumming can act as a form of communication between woodpeckers, a kind of woodland Morse code. A red-bellied woodpecker feeds their chick in Flatwoods Conservation Park. This intriguing drumming behavior is...

As I was walking in one of the Conservation Parks the other day, I saw that a dead tree had finally fallen. This was not particularly eventful, and I do not know if it made a sound or not, but this dead tree was something that I had admired on my hikes for a while. Over the seasons, I’d watch it become bare of its bark, see more woodpecker holes in its trunk, and admire the life that it still fostered as it slowly decayed upright. I’m sad to see it fall, its suddenly exposed old roots becoming a tangle of new habitat, but I know it’ll still be a long while before it's gone. Two snags, likely oaks, in coastal habitats. While some areas of our parks and preserves are kept well-manicured for our safety and enjoyment, the dead trees remain a necessary staple – as long as they’re not presenting a hazard to hikers, of course. But why? They don’t provide shade to cool our parks, nor fruit to feed wildlife, nor blooming flowers for pollinators; what are they contributing to the environme...