I wish I could have managed dessert (No Frills’ Key lime pie looked particularly toothsome), but I had to press on to where I was to meet some of the Florida Wildlife Federation folks and, I hoped, a scrub jay. I drove south past Lake June-in-Winter through ragged orange groves to a landscape as desiccated as Highlands Hammock was damp and turned into the gates of Archbold Biological Station, founded in 1941 by zoologist and explorer Richard Archbold. Son of a Standard Oil millionaire (and pictured as dashingly mustachioed on a Lake Placid mural), Archbold thought that flora and fauna ought to be studied in situ. So he turned a large estate into a research center, housing laboratories, a library and important specimen collections.
These days, the station welcomes conservationists, scientists and non-experts alike. The new Frances Archbold Hufty Center, a LEED platinum-rated building (that’s as green as you can get), with meeting rooms, observation decks and exhibits on the natural history of the Lake Wales Ridge and the Florida scrub, will open in January. You don’t have to wait till then, though: Anyone who wants to see the primeval Florida that flourished before the citrus industry, paved roads and subdivisions, is welcome to hike the Nature Trail.
“The scrub can be an acquired taste,” says Hillary Swain, field biologist and executive director of Archbold Station. It’s true that if your taste in wilderness runs to majestic snow-topped mountains or towering conifers, the more austere beauty of the sandy, almost desert-like scrub takes some getting used to. Out in the dwarf forest, you are actually walking in the canopy instead of under it. According to Swain, “70 percent of the biomass is below ground.” It has to be: If the trees didn’t have a serious underground root system, they couldn’t conserve enough water and nutrients to thrive and wouldn’t survive fire. The scrub must burn periodically to allow these long-lived plants — the palmettos are, on average, more than 700 years old — to re-sprout.
Leading a dozen or so of us on a path through the scrub, Swain points out myrtle oaks, hypericum and Florida rosemary. She calls the scrub “Florida’s attic,” a repository for “wonderful lost ecological treasures.” She says, “Florida’s coastline has advanced and retreated, sea levels have risen and fallen, but the Lake Wales Ridge has stayed high and dry, just like your attic stays safe in a flood. And like your attic, you’re bound to find something valuable and rare in there.”
Sure enough, sitting on a myrtle oak, there he was: a bird with deep turquoise feathers and black eyes shiny as jet beads. Swain held out a peanut, explaining that station scientists don’t habitually feed the scrub jays (who prefer acorns), but since the birds are outgoing and curious, they use peanuts to get a close look at them. The bird ate his peanut, cast an unimpressed bright glance around at the human interlopers in his kingdom, and flew off.
Roberts, an essayist for NPR, is the author of “Dream State,” a historical memoir of Florida.
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