Everglades headwaters to flow freer with final land acquisitions
Brian Skoloff /Associated Press /Apr 11
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - The headwaters of the Everglades will soon flow freer now that all the land has been purchased to restore the Kissimmee River's meandering path.State water managers say they have completed the acquisition of about 103,000 acres of land that will allow much of the water toreturn to its natural state in the river basin, flowing south through Lake Okeechobee and on into the Everglades. The 22-mile Kissimmee River restoration project, authorized by Congress in 1992, aims to undo decades of degradation and flood control diversions by filling an offshoot canal to restore 43 miles of the river bed. Seven miles of the project have already been completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ending an era during which wildlife fled the parched land for wetlands elsewhere."We have wading birds coming in like we've never seen before, fish coming into ...

New fish study explores habitats in St. Lucie River
Suzanne Wentley /TCPalm /Apr 11
HUTCHINSON ISLAND — How're the fish? Scientists were never quite sure — until now. As a precursor to the local Everglades restoration effort, Treasure Coast researchers are working with state and federal biologists to begin a comprehensive study of the fish habits and habitats in the St. Lucie River. While scientists have monitored the river's water quality, sea grass and even certain sections of the fish population for years, this project will be the first initiative using state-of-the-art technology to study howfish respond to excess freshwater, murky conditions and dwindling places to hide from predators. "This is the most comprehensive look at fish in the river that has ever been done," said Grant Gilmore, lead researcher and senior scientist with Estuarine, Coastal and Ocean Science Inc. "Right now, we don't do systematic surveys," he said. "We're try ...

State disputes St. Lucie River activists' claims of faulty data
Suzanne Wentley /TCPalm /Apr 12
Calling river advocates "amateur" climatologists, state scientists on Tuesday denied recent criticism that the data used for Lake Okeechobeeoperations and Everglades restoration was fundamentally flawed. Instead, hydrologists and operations managers from the South Florida Water Management District — responding to a draft report released in January by the St. Lucie River Initiative — blamed political and economic realities on the degraded health of the St. Lucie River.District scientists, in a draft paper sent for peer-review Tuesday, said both the data used in computer models and water management decisions they make each day acknowledge the decades-long climatic trend of wet weather caused by a change in ocean temperature — an assertion river activistsquestioned in recent meetings. "I would stand up quickly to say the models are not flawed and the data sets are not f ...

Ancient sloth's remains unearthed near Lake O
Tim O'Melia /Palm Beach Post /Apr 12
Long ago in South Florida, before the Age of the Gated Community, before the early bird special, even before the Everglades restoration, the giant ground sloth roamed. Well, maybe not roamed, but lumbered. This was no modern-day laconic, tree sloth, dangling upside down, rarely touching the ground and hoping no one noticed him. This was Ermotherium, the mother of all sloths. At 5 tons, he was as large as an elephant and could never climb a tree. Fifteen feet tall on all fours, with a 6-foot tail, he didn't have to. He was able to scrape greenery from 20-foot trees with 18-inch claws bigger than those of a T. rex.How do we know all this? His remains were found on April Fool's Day in an old sugar cane field, a mile east of the Sonny's barbecue restaurant in Clewiston and 38 miles south of Lake Okeechobee.A backhoe operator dug up parts of a fossilized sloth in a pit he was excavating a ...

Scientists unearth 12,000-year-old giant sloth in Everglades restoration
Peter Franceschina /Sun Sentinel /Apr 12
The big brown bones looked as if they had been scattered by a careless hand,strewn around a small pit about 10 feet down -- the remains of a giant sloth, frozen in time for thousands of years.The crunching sound on April 1 signaled something more unusual than the typical rock being dug up. Contractors building a 2,000-acre filter marsh for polluted agricultural runoff in southeastern Hendry County stopped digging to see what had been unearthed: part of a massive jawbone. The prehistoric sloth, an elephant-sized herbivore that stood taller than 20feet on its hind legs, inhabited the Florida peninsula until roughly 12,000 years ago. Slow and lumbering, the sloth had giant claws to reach high into trees to tear down the most succulent leaves. It was an interesting, if not rare, paleontological find buried far beneath the rich, black muck in the Everglades Agricultural ...

River activists applaude Loxahatchee River plan
Suzanne Wentley /TCPalm /Apr 13
TEQUESTA — State water managers on Wednesday approved a long-anticipated plan to restore the Loxahatchee River after saltwater intrusion and plumes of polluted runoff damaged the celebrated waterway. River activists applauded the measure, which called for an increase infreshwater to flow into the river's federally designated "Wild and Scenic" Northwest Fork during the dry season. The restoration plan used computer models to determine the appropriatevolume of water to move the saltwater wedge toward the Jupiter Inlet, which was permanently opened in 1947, without destroying the salty conditions of the estuary where an oyster population thrives. But while the plan sets up restoration targets, there still is inadequate storage and infrastructure in the river's watershed to deliver the promised water, said Patrick Hayes, the executive director of the Loxahatchee River Co ...

Florida's dawdling demands court oversight
staff /Daytona Beach News /Apr 15
Florida's governor went to Washington two months ago to convince his brother's administration that the state, not a federal judge, should have the last word on Everglades restoration per the 1994 Everglades Forever Act. It's a wonder Jeb Bush, blood or not, wasn't laughed out of town. Let's see, when the state last had almost sole say over the Everglades, the 4 million acre "river of grass" shrank to 2 million as sugar farming andsubdivision sprawl claimed acre after acre of what was often disparaged as swamp. For years the state turned a deaf ear to public cries for stricter controls on pollution, land development and water consumption to ease pressure on the Everglades. The state dawdled as the native grasses gave way to thousands ofacres of cattails and other invasive plants, as stagnant water pooled and dried to cracked ground where clear water once moved t ...

Hope springs for speedy passage of water projects
Rebecca Panoff /Sun Sentinel /Apr 18
FORT PIERCE · With a dolphin jumping out of the Indian River Lagoon in the background, U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez vowed Monday to try to speed passage of the $1.2 billion federal act to clean up local waterways. Martinez, R-Fla., said he wants to get the legislation, the Water Resources Development Act, on the Senate calendar in four to six weeks. He said he will discuss the timetable with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist during a meeting today in Orlando. "It's important that we recognize the importance of passing ... the Water Resources [Development] Act so that we can designate this area for the kind of cleanup and preservation it needs," Martinez said at the St. Lucie County Historical Museum. The act, which passed the House last year but has yet to reach the Senate floor, would authorize $1.2 billion for water-quality projects in Martin and St. Lucie County. ...

Biologist Battles Killer Pythons in Florida Par
Tom Brown /Plannet Ark /Apr 18
EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. - The man leading efforts to eradicate giant Burmese python snakes from Everglades National Park sounds almost fearful, and certainly not optimistic, when he talks about the chances of wiping out an invasive species he calls "the enemy".That is partly because Skip Snow, a 54-year-old veteran wildlife biologist with the US National Park Service, says he doesn't know how many of the slithery monsters are in the swampy Florida park. "It could be literally thousands," Snow told Reuters. "It could be a number I don't want to know. It could be scary." It's scary indeed, especially since one of the creatures was aggressive enough to try devouring a 6-foot (1.8 metre) alligator in the park last year. The alligator is believed to have been dead already and the snake also died trying to digest it. There have been other encounters betwe ...

Everglades solution: Troubled to the core
Julie Hauserman /Orlando Sentinel /Apr 19
TALLAHASSEE -- An alligator swam behind the president when he stood inEverglades National Park five years ago with TV cameras rolling. The government, he assured us, was going to save the Everglades. Ten and a half billion dollars, we're now told, is the price of putting nature back to right again. And who is going to save the day? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the same outfit that rode in on bulldozers, went hand-to-hand against snakes, and declared Mission Accomplished 40 years ago when it drained America's greatest wetland. We didn't catch on to the big mistake until the wading birds were gone, the panthers endangered, the rivers polluted, and Everglades fish were no good to eat. Now, we hear more bad news about the Corps out of New Orleans. It turns out that the New Orleans levees failed because the Corps didn't build them right in the first place. We're ...

Build skyway, restore the Everglades
BRIAN SCHERF-OP /Miami Herald /Apr 19
The April 5 article Everglades superintendent gets high marks referred to the environmentalists' position of advocating for the skyway option of bridging the Tamiami Trail 11-mile project area. After 17 years of delay with the Modified Water Deliveries Project and five years of federal and state spending and paper pushing with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, where is the promised restoration? Even pictures from satellites show that Tamiami Trail acts as a giant dam restricting Everglades water flow. As one scientist stated, ``We may have wetlands, but if it doesn't flow, it isn't the Everglades.'' Everglades National Park Superintendent Dan Kimball's agency stated that the skyway is the environmentally preferred alternative that would best restore the water flow and reduce wildlife mortality.More than 20 organizations and municipal governments ...

Stay clear on Everglades
Editorial /Palm Beach Post /Apr 19
An 11th-hour change to a long-planned Everglades restoration permit could undo the project's benefits. Before that happens, the South Florida Water Management District can undo the change.At issue is whether the village of Wellington can continue to pump billions of gallons of water, polluted with phosphorus from horse manure and fertilizer, into the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Under threat of state fines, Wellington and the water district agreed to share in a project that, by Dec. 31, would reverse the flow of water north to the C-51 Canal. From there, it would be filter Wellington would be responsible for reducing the phosphorus level to 50 parts per billion before the water reached the canal. The district, responsible for building a pump station and stormwater treatment area, then would have to reach the 10-parts-per-billion point considered low enough for the Everglades ...

Bagging a gator just got easier
Byron Stout /News Press /Apr 20
Florida's wildlife managers are more than doubling the length of this year's statewide alligator hunt, and license holders will be able to buy as many harvest permits as they like. Instead of a five-week season in September and early October, gator hunting will begin Aug. 15 and run through Nov. 1. And gator trappers previously limited to two gator harvest tags will be able to buyadditional permits at two for $61.50, at least while the supply of 4,000 lasts. Cape Coral gator hunter Curt Harden hopes to do his share of harvesting. A large alligator turns toward passengers on an airboat ride at Lake Trafford on Wednesday."I love it," Harden said of the sport he took up four years ago, stalking gators with a crossbow and fishing arrows on Lake Okeechobee. Florida estimates its population of adult gators at more than one million — a relatively stable number. But that number co ...

Citizens concerned about fate of Everglades restoration urged to contact Frist
Suzanne Wentley /TCPalm /Apr 20
STUART — Sen. Bill Frist, majority leader of the U.S. Senate, has been the recipient of a bottle of green algae from the St. Lucie River from Sen. Bill Nelson. He's received a big bag of river muck from Rep. Mark Foley, a recent personal visit in Orlando from Sen. Mel Martinez and even letters signed by 81 senators — all asking him to permit floor debate of a bill that includes the local $1.2 billion Everglades restoration. Now it's Treasure Coast residents' turn to apply pressure.Martin County officials are asking all residents to contact Frist on Wednesday to demand he bring the Water Resources Development Act to the Senate floor so planned reservoirs, stormwater treatment facilities, land preservation and muck removal in Martin and St. Lucie counties can begin. "It's important we put as great a push as we can in the next six to eight weeks to get the WRDA bill ...

Everglades restoration questions can be answered
staff /Miami Herald /Apr 20
A toll-free information line with the latest news about Everglades restoration is now available. Callers to 877-CERP-USA will hear about the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and upcomingpublic meetings and events, and will be able to leave a message requesting material be mailed to them. The line is recorded in English and Spanish. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District, which is leading the federal effort to restore the Everglades, created 877-CERP-USA. ''Our goal is to promote citizen involvement and understanding of the plan to restore America's Everglades,'' said Nanciann Regalado, chief of corporate communications. ``This toll-free line gives callers free and easy access to the latest information.'' The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan is the largest environmental restoration in history. ...

State on its toes in Everglades
COLLEEN M. CASTILLE /Daytona Beach News /Apr 21
No other government in the world is as committed to an environmental endeavor as Florida is to restoration of the River of Grass. I take issue with criticism, like that in a recent News-Journal editorial, that calls into question the state's commitment to the Everglades. Florida has come a long way since Gov. Lawton Chiles conceded the state's failure to enforce water quality standards and entered into the 1992 Settlement Agreement with the federal government to restore water quality in the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and Everglades National Park. Today, Florida is in compliance with state and federal law and has fulfilled all of its legal commitments to date under the court order. As required by the settlement agreement, the state has constructed five stormwater treatment areas to clean water flowing into the Everglades. The 36,000 acres of manmade marsh ...

Audit blames Everglades work delays on agencies
Robert King /Palm Beach Post /Apr 22
Who knew unclogging a drain could cost so much? The drain is the network of canals, levees and pumps that control water flow into Everglades National Park. The plumber is the Army Corps of Engineers, which Congress told in 1989 to replenish some of the park's marshes and prairies. Seventeen years later, the plumbing bill has ballooned from $81 million to nearly $400 million, and the project isn't expected to be finished until 2009 — if then. Meanwhile, the drainage logjam has added to an ecologically devastating glut of water plaguing the central Everglades, Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie River. A new federal audit places much of the blame on the park and its sister agencies in the U.S. Interior Department, saying they have had trouble communicating with outsiders — and among themselves — about how to pursue the project. Interior also has repeatedly changed its mind about key el ...

Getting The Scoop On Spoonbills
Yvette Hammett /Tampa Tribune /Apr 22
RIVERVIEW - A small band of scientists traipses gingerly over the algae-covered rocks along the shoreline of a man-made island and into a tall mangrove canopy. Armed with the essential tools for their task - ladder, bucket, net and a string of metal bands - the wildlife researchers slip quietly into a secret world visited by few people. Standing below a hovering mass of pelicans, ibises, egrets and herons, Mark Rachal, a volunteer with the Florida Audubon Society, spies a previously placed pink tag on one of the mangroves. He holds the metal ladder steady as Brennan Mulrooney climbs toward a clump of sticks wedged high in the tree. Teetering on one foot, Mulrooney reaches a gloved hand into the nest, plucking out one of three squirming pale pink blobs, then a second and third, placing each one gently into an oblong white bucket.Back on the ground, Rob Heath holds each of the wrig ...