Amid growth, a pristine oasis

Brooker Creek Headwaters Nature Preserve is a reminder of what Florida used to look like.

By JOSH ZIMMER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 17, 2003

KEYSTONE -- Driving up Brown Road, park manager Richard Ross slows his pickup to a quiet stop. Just ahead at a culvert lies Brooker Creek, making a long, meandering journey toward Pinellas County.

The creek, flush from recent El Nino rains, wends through the 1,200-acre Brooker Creek Headwaters Nature Preserve in northwest Hillsborough County. It is a pristine tract of trees, wetlands and open fields that is a haven for animals and, in some cases, rare Florida plants.

"Here's turkey, right here, right in front of us," Ross says excitedly as a flock walks single-file from one section of woods to another.

But the noise flusters them. They disperse and flutter their wings. An especially good flyer lands on a branch 20-feet above ground, keeping a wary watch on the unexpected visitors.

Even in rural Keystone, where restrictive zoning limits homes to one per five acres, the preserve stands out as an oasis of largely untouched nature. Stretching from Van Dyke Road to Lutz-Lake Fern Road, the land is a reminder of what this place, and many parts of Florida, looked like before the backhoes arrived.

It almost became just another subdivision. In the early-1990s, a group of investors dreamed of building Cypress Bend, with 900-homes, a golf course and a shopping center. Everyone wanted to cash in on Keystone's natural appeal.

But like so many other grand ideas, Cypress Bend fell victim to the nationwide savings and loan crisis.

Park Bank, which loaned the developers money, went belly up. When the developers could not pay the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $22.1-million, the federal government foreclosed on the land. Hillsborough, pushed by resident opposition and new environmental preservation funds, eventually bought 900 acres from the FDIC in a $3.5-million partnership with the Southwest Florida Water Management District.

The 1994 purchase came at a critical time for Keystone, former Keystone Civic Association president Dickey Davis said. The association, already battle-hardened from its water wars with Pinellas, led opposition to the project.

"People out here were extremely pleased," Davis recalled. "The developers obviously were not. The people who . . . liked the rural lifestyle were pleased because it showed something like that could be done. The people in power could see what the average homeowner was saying. It was a big plus."

El Nino has put the preserve on fine display. Brooker Creek, often nothing more than a dry, swerving water bed, is animated. Water pools around lush cypress heads while rays of sunlight seeping through canopies of pine and oak highlights ripples on the creek and other rivulets. It's as if spring and summer, when the wet season deposits its yearly downpours, have traded places with fall and winter.

Eight years after it opened, the preserve remains a small public draw, although that may change as county planners complete plans to run a significant portion of the Upper Tampa Bay Trail through its western and northern sections. Visitors are counted by the handful, not the hundreds, Ross said.

But its value arguably increases every year as development wraps an ever-tightening noose around the property, 60 percent of which is wetlands. To the east lies Cheval, to the south is Van Dyke Farms, to the northwest sits Montreux. Traffic is constant, and more potential development is waiting in the wings.

The preserve was a crucial acquisition for the area, said Craig Huegel, manager of the Pinellas section of Brooker Creek. The headwaters supply that 7,000-acre tract straddling the Hillsborough border. It also filters polluted runoff that drains into the 42-square-mile watershed from surrounding development.

By 1989, Florida had lost more than 10-million acres of wetlands, according to one federal study.

"I've always believed that protecting the source of the creek and all the property around it is of vital importance for the whole preserve complex," Huegel said. "The water originates in that amorphous region. As those swamps fill up with water and release, that's what we rely on."

Wild Turkey, Deer

Lacking beauty on a grand scale, the preserve offers a subtle interplay of upland oak hammocks set amid scrubby open fields where cows used to pasture, and where large clusters of cypress wetlands collect water like oversized bathtubs. Slowly, the tea-colored liquid is released into the Brooker Creek watershed like an unplugged drain.

Wild turkey share space with deer, foxes, wild boars, gopher tortoises and snakes. The wetlands are a magnet for ibises, wood storks, herons and sandhill cranes.

Seventeen miles later the water reaches Lake Tarpon and eventually runs into Tampa Bay, a federally protected water body recovering from years of unchecked pollution.

The preserve also is what Ross, a two-decade veteran of the county's Parks and Recreation Department, calls home. In addition to Brooker Creek, he helps oversee other publicly owned property that falls under the county's Environmental Lands Acquisition and Preservation Program. Since voters approved the targeted sales tax increase in the late-1980s, tens of millions of dollars have been spent buying more than 37,000 acres of environmentally sensitive lands throughout Hillsborough.

Ross, a big, laid back man who clearly enjoys the peacefulness of the outdoors, jumped at the chance to move onto the property. He and his wife, a Tarpon Springs schoolteacher at the time, were living in St. Petersburg next to an Elvis impersonator who loved blasting the King's music in the wee morning hours.

"We didn't hesitate very long to say, 'We'll move,' " he said.

During a recent tour of the property, Ross, 46, hopped into his county pickup -- with the requisite four-wheel drive option -- and drove past his county-owned house. He headed through a clearing toward a dense thicket of trees. A red-shouldered hawk, perched atop a metal pole, surveyed the scene.

"He's always moving from tree to tree, taking care of mice and rats around here," Ross observed.

Narrow paths almost too small for the vehicle eventually lead to open uplands, which comprise about 40 percent of the property. Sections like these look more natural now. It's not an accident.

Ross oversees a long-term cleanup and restoration of the preserve, 300 acres bigger now after various purchases during the past eight years. For decades, landowners let their cattle roam the tract. They dug ditches around the cypress heads to drain wetlands and create more pasture land.

But the cows ate the native plants, and in doing so they invited blackberry briars and other nuisance plants to take their place. Although the cattle no longer roam the property, the preserve is still struggling to recover. Park managers periodically kill off the briars and other exotics with prescribed burns in hopes the native plants will retake the land.

Humans are responsible for other kinds of damage. Parts of the property were used as illegal dumps for "everything from bathroom tiles to asbestos," Ross said. "I've probably taken out myself close to 30 30-ton Dumpsters."

His job is part naturalist, part garbage man -- and part killjoy.

Ross is engaged in a running battle with hunters who, judging by the amount of activity, so like the abundant wildlife they are willing to risk arrest for one of the preserve's deer, wild boars or wild turkeys.

Not many have been caught, said Ross, although he has removed many deer stands over the years. The ladder-like stands, which hunters use for stalking deer, are propped up against the tool shed near his house like spoils of war.

The message is out there loud and clear: Hunters Not Welcome.

Fence repair on the side

Ross eventually reaches a wood-and-wire fence and a large electrical box that would have provided lightto some of Cypress Bend's many residents. He parks by the little-used eastern entrance to the preserve.

A similar fence runs along the other side of Ramblewood Road, separating the road from the preserve's southeast corner. But unlike humans, animals do not make such distinctions; which leads to road kill. Ross periodically retrieves dead deer from the road.

By default, he also repairs many sections of fence damaged by bad drivers. In Ross' opinion the 45 mph speed limit on Ramblewood is too fast and, combined with people's propensity to speed, makes the road unsafe for animals. He said he considered it an accomplishment when the county got the speed limit set at 35 mph, but he really wishes Ramblewood, the southern entrance to Cheval off Van Dyke, had been closed off.

"When we bought the property we were going to put a fence across the road," he said. "At that point they (the county) decided it wasn't necessary. In retrospect, they should have. This is a major crossing area (for animals)."

Life in and around the preserve is a balancing act between people and animals. Though bulldozed by machines, the land is far from tamed.

Tales of wildlife encounters abound for Cheval resident Lori Lencioni. She and her husband paid extra for a conservation tract along the boundary with the preserve. From her back window she can see wetlands and animal tracks. Though they love the proximity to nature, at night they sometimes hear grunting boars and other wildlife sounds that leave them, admittedly, a little unnerved.

A couple of weeks ago Lencioni consoled a new neighbor whose recently planted bushes were ravished by deer. "They got everything," she said.

That wasn't as bad as what happened several years ago when a young boy was playing outside. Thinking it was a stick, he picked up a pygmy rattlesnake, one of four poisonous snakes found in the preserve, and was bit in the hand. An emergency helicopter was flown in and the family moved shortly after, Lencioni said.

"We have it all," she said. "We've had to come in from the back because we heard sounds that scared us. You start thinking of these Steven King novels. It's one thing to hear it. I don't go walking out at night.

"The only thing we haven't seen is snakes, which is all right by me. I know they're out there."

Lencioni, a board member of both the Cheval West community association and community development district, thinks the speed limit is fine at 45 mph. The problem, she says, is people who drive unnecessarily fast and aren't aware of the animals.

Since the speed limit was raised two years ago, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office hasn't felt the need to crack down on drivers because the average speed seems to hover in the high 40s, traffic homicide investigator John Duran said. The community thought about installing more road lights, Lencioni said, but ruled out the measure after realizing it would disturb the animals.

In Search of the Creek

So much water fills the preserve now that old farming ditches flow as abundantly as Brooker Creek itself. Even with four-wheel drive Ross refuses to risk grounding his county vehicle at some crossings and backs up toward higher ground. He's already lost two vehicles, he says.

After pointing out some endangered hooded pitcher plants he drives on. After an hour he stops the car over a narrow, moving rivulet. The water moves inveterately south and west, but gently.

This is Brooker Creek.

"There's not a real definite creek," he says nonchalantly. But "you see sheet flow."

Despite its environmental contributions, the preserve remains threatened by development.

Hillsborough County has bought as much available private land as possible around the original 900 acres, said Kurt Gremley, real estate manager for the land preservation program. That is not always enough to stop landowners near the headwaters from selling their properties.

Charles Moore, for example, owns 286 acres off Lutz-Lake Fern just west of the Suncoast Parkway that a developer is targeting for at least 100 homes.

In some cases, the county is better off not making an offer to landowners, Gremley said. Booming land prices in Keystone have turned once-cheap land into potential gold mines.

On Brown Road, four landowners own about 30 acres of private land, creating an enclave within the preserve. Gremley said he has spoken with at least two of the landowners.

One asked too much, he said. Another owner, retired maintenance man Oscar Tomas, wanted to negotiate a life estate agreement that would have left his property to the county after his death. But Gremley said officials declined because at one-home-per-five-acre zoning, there never could be more than one house on the property, making development less of a threat. In addition, officials didn't want the responsibility of knocking down the home, he said.

Tomas, whose property taxes have skyrocketed along with the building boom, was disappointed but took the failure in stride. It's easy to see why he would not want to leave. Deer, wild turkeys and squirrels visit his back yard everyday. He loves it.

Looking across his front yard toward the preserve, he smiles.

"Who could ask for anything better?" he says.

-- Times files were used to write this story. Josh Zimmer covers Keystone/Odessa, Citrus Park and the environment. He can be reached at 269-5314 or zimmer@sptimes.com

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