Southeast Florida Scrub Ecosystem Working Group

Translocation Updates Spring 2019

Winding Waters Natural Area Gopher Tortoise Waif Recipient Site: Palm Beach County Environmental Resources Management (ERM) received a permit to receive up to 100 gopher tortoises on 150 acres on the western half of Winding Waters NA.  They received the permit in June 2017 and to date (4/10/2019) have taken in 51 GTs of which 12 were juveniles and don’t count toward the 100 mature gopher tortoises.  About 11 gopher tortoises currently have working trackers and ERM working with the South Florida Wildlife Center has been tracking gopher tortoises to learn a little about their burrowing habits.

Florida Scrub-Jay Translocation to Jonathan Dickinson State Park: The Florida Scrub-Jay Recovery Plan has proposed translocation as a strategy to maintain landscape connectivity among the most viable populations, to assist those populations in growing and recolonizing suitable habitat, and to preserve as much genetic diversity as possible.  This year FWC staff initiated a translocation project in Jonathan Dickinson State Park (JDSP) with the goals of increasing population size and adding genetic diversity to this isolated population.  The project is being conducting in partnership with Archbold Biological Station and Cornell University and will include several years of demographic monitoring and genetic analysis.  On February 6^th, 2019, at 1:11 pm, Karl Miller and his staff released the first family group of three jays from Ocala National Forest, which is a distance of about 180 miles.  The three jays remained as an intact group, settled close to their release site, and have begun nesting.  FWC plans to translocate more scrub-jays beginning in September. Read more about the effort in this Audubon article, How Researchers Hope to Save the Florida Scrub-Jay from an Inbreeding Crisis.