The results of Python Challenge 2013, a multi-agency effort that offered cash prizes to promote the removal of non-native Burmese pythons from the greater Everglades area in southern Florida, are now in the books. Although the end result was bad news for exotic pythons, winners included the successful hunters, scientists and parks—and three lucky snakes.
South Florida, including Everglades National Park, has seen a precipitous decline in nesting success among wading birds, according to a report by the South Florida Water Management District.
The Florida National Scenic Trail will mark its 30th anniversary during 2013, and a special event is scheduled for January 4 to dedicate the trail's Southern Terminus with a monument at the Oasis Visitor Center in Big Cypress National Preserve.
The "Everglades Pizza" might be the rage in some parts of Florida, but before you sink your teeth into the pie with frog legs, gator meat, and ground python, check where the python came from, because the big snakes slithering through Everglades National Park are incredibly high in mercury.
A python hunt, with cash rewards, will be held in south Florida beginning in January and running into February with hopes of denting the population of non-native pythons slithering around the Everglades, though the national park will be off-limits to most hunters.
Can the National Park Service more fully embrace the "precautionary principle," the concept that it err on the side of "science-informed prudence and restraint," as suggested by Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks?
With the Obama administration nearing the end of its first term, it has a track record for its stance on public lands in general and national parks specifically, and it's not as rosy as many conservationists had hoped for when the president came into office.
Inspired by graceful herons, crawling insects, and even alligators, the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts is focusing on south Florida's national parks in its latest edition of Face of America.
A year-long review of how wildlife management and other sciences are studied in the National Park System has produced a call for the National Park Service to both recommit its staff to the sciences and to reemphasize science in the park system.