What an enjoyable 13 minutes. Thanks Carlton (and Oragator). Many of those images made me nostalgic for The Big Cypress and Fakahatchee - to be holding an antenna listening for a faint beep and wet from head to toe. Those were the days.
We are building 6 panther crossings in east Collier if and when ACOE completes their review of what the FDEP has been reviewing for the last 6 years. They ain't cheap
While they are developing just about every square inch of central and North Central Florida where the gopher turtles and indigo snakes live along with deer, bear, turkeys and on and on. No piece of land is safe it seems. Ocala will not have a horse farm left in 10 years at the rate they are going.
Not cheap, no. In fact they are hideously expensive. I was surprised at how much it cost to elevate the roadway (dirt) to accomplish the underpass.
@oragator1 thank you for this. It was very enjoyable to watch. I forwarded it to my son in Florida. In graduate school we discussed the importance of wildlife corridors even at the local farming level and how modern farming practices have eliminated a lot of the corridors by plowing from edge to edge of a field.
I think this is mildly related. I live on 5 acres and most of my neighbors have 3-4 board fences with field fence to inhibit wildlife from freely roaming into their yards. I have a nice 4 board fence but I chose to not do the field fence so turtles, bunnies and other critters can move as nature intended. I want them to move through my property.
we have millions of yards of dirt, it's the 10 x 20 box culvert 200' long that costs so much. doing a VE design now to see if MSE walls and bridges are better. The entire development has lakes minimum 150' wide abutting the corridors and where we don't have lakes (small gaps), we have that 12' tall with barb wire top panther fence. and now we have two kara kara nests we didn't have when we started. Judge recently ruled that FDEP cannot issue permits for federal wetlands so 4 years of permitting just went out the window and we get to start all over again with ACOE that doesn't have the staff to process the thousands of applications that are getting filed a all at once. Wrecked over $1.2B inland closings this quarter just on projects I am working on
