OPINION: Eglin’s Warriors Also Defend the Environment
By Pat Rice, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach
May 27–I spent time last week out in the woods with some of the critters on the Eglin Air Force Base reservation.
The base Environmental Management folks gave a nature tour of sorts to their honorary commanders, and invited me along.
A cynic might sniff at the notion of a military base caring about the environment. But the cynic would be wrong. Eglin’s reputation for environmental stewardship is well-earned.
Michael Spaits, public affairs spokesman for the base’s Environmental Management program, said there are good reasons for the base to practice good stewardship. Eglin is subject to pretty much the same environmental regulations as the rest of us. Being kind to nature protects the base’s missions.
The Eglin reservation also contains one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. It includes everything from swamp to desert to ocean. Among the things I found out last week:
–Eglin includes about 464,000 acres, and about 403,000 of those acres are forested. About 280,000 acres of the reservation are open to the public for recreational use.
–Within the Eglin reservation are 2,117 archaeological sites — mostly Indian — and 165 historic structures.
–All told, 57 rare plant species and 48 rare animal species call Eglin home. –About 750,000 trees are planted on the base each year. They are planted by hand with a tool that looks like a shovel with a pipe on the end. –Eglin control-burns 87,000 acres a year. Burning is actually necessary to maintain the proper and natural state of the ground of the forest. One tree of critical concern on the base is the longleaf pine. About 72 percent of the nation’s remaining longleaf pine forest is on Eglin. Longleaf pines are important because they are the home of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. Kathy Gault, an endangered-species biologist, pointed out that woodpeckers require longleaf pines that are at least 80 to 100 years old for their nests, which they build by pecking a hole into the tree and then hollowing it out.
A nest she showed us was in a tree estimated to be 150 years old. Some longleaf pines on Eglin may be 500 years old.
The red-cockaded woodpecker is doing pretty well. A decade ago, there were only a hundred or so “active clusters” of woodpeckers on the base. Gault now estimates there are 360 clusters. The goal is to reach 425 clusters in five years, at which point the woodpecker will be considered “recovered.”
The red-cockaded woodpecker also is acclimated to bomb testing. In 2003, the “mother of all bombs” — MOAB — was detonated at Eglin within a quarter-mile of a woodpecker cluster. Spaits said it didn’t harm or bother the birds at all!
The other well-known endangered species on Eglin is the Okaloosa darter, a fish an inch or two long that inhabits the creeks that cut through the base. The Okaloosa darter is found only on Eglin and surrounding land.
The darter’s enemy also is not bombs but erosion, said Bill Tate of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So the base has focused on such things as making sure roads are properly graded so that rain runoff doesn’t carve unnaturally into the deep-banked creeks.
Fifteen years ago, Tate said, only about 10,000 darters were left. Now there may be as many as 500,000. It’s possible the darter could be “downlisted” from endangered to threatened in a year or so.
If that happens, it could be the first fish ever taken off the endangered list as a result of something other than extinction.
Now, wouldn’t that be something?
Patrick Rice is editor of the Daily News. He can be reached at patrickr@nwfdailynews.com. Or write to him at the Northwest Florida Daily News; 200 Racetrack Road N.W.; P.O. Box 2949; Fort Walton Beach, FL 32549. His phone number is (850) 863-1111, ext. 400. Read his blog at nwfdailynews.com.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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