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Let there be life

Cockroach Bay Preserve is looking like its old, old self, the kind of place where plants, animals and humans can exhale (despite that awful name).

By BILL VARIAN
Published January 6, 2006

RUSKIN - Richard Sullivan stands on the tide-exposed shoreline of a lagoon tossing a shrimp and almost apologizing.

There are days, he says, when the bait bucket empties quickly as cast after cast yields keeper redfish, snook and an occasional black drum.

But on this day, the bites are sporadic, the occasional tug coming courtesy of runts that must be tossed back.

The fish and natural life around this hole nevertheless represent a victory in man's battle to fix some of the natural landscape he has destroyed.

Not long ago, this lagoon was an abandoned borrow pit, once mined for shell and sand used to make roadbeds that speed Florida's development. For almost 15 years, government workers, civic groups and volunteers have been working to resurrect the former pit and the 650 acres around it.

"It takes thousands of years to create these habitats," said Sullivan, who manages the preserve for Hillsborough County. "It takes about 15 minutes to destroy them with a bulldozer."

The crew of restoration workers has attempted to speed up nature's work by a few millennia. In two years, they hope to conclude their efforts here - to re-create an environment resembling the one settlers found when they arrived at Tampa Bay.

Their work is wrapping up just as new settlers are knocking on the door, buying up land and carving it into neighborhoods on former vegetable and sod farms and orange groves around mining pits that are now lakes.

The preserve serves as reminder of what draws people to Florida, even to places with names like Cockroach Bay.

"It's a jewel on Tampa Bay," said Nanette Holland, an avid fly fisher and public outreach coordinator for the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, which coordinates protection and restoration efforts around Tampa Bay.

The history of how Cockroach Bay got its name is largely lost. Rodney Kite-Powell, curator of the Tampa Bay History Center, could find no reference to the naming, or a change on a map to indicate when it got the moniker.

"It's a very unappealing name," Kite-Powell said. "I'm sure it was a very apt description of the area, and it just stuck."

There are two prevailing theories, said Brandt Henningsen, a senior environmental scientist for the Southwest Florida Water Management District who manages the Cockroach Bay restoration project.

At one time, the upland was likely covered by pine flatwoods and sprinkled with palmettos, palm trees and shrubs, which attract the large cockroach-like palmetto bug. But it seems unlikely the area was distinct from anywhere else in Florida.

"There are no giant cockroaches in here," said Sullivan, who lives in the preserve as part of his job. "I'm not the best homemaker in the world and I've never seen one in my trailer."

The second theory, which Henningsen prefers, is that early arrivals to Tampa Bay likely would have looked out on a clear, shallow bay. And in those waters, they would have seen lots of horseshoe crabs, which look a little like big cockroaches.

"Even though it sounds like kind of a nasty place, the name certainly is not symptomatic of how wonderful a place it is," he said.

Scientists think that long ago, maybe 40,000 years ago, the preserve, on the shores of Little Cockroach Bay south of Ruskin, was the mouth of the Little Manatee River, which now empties to the north.

The belief is based largely on the rich deposits of shell and sand found there. For decades the land was mined to supply the underlying base of Florida roads. What wasn't mined was farmed.

Landowners built housing for workers who toiled in the fields, and dug mosquito ditches to drain marshes and keep the bugs off them. Over the years, non-native plants like Australian pine and Brazilian pepper trees choked out native vegetation.

In 1991, the county bought the two main parcels that comprise the Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve for $2.1-million. The money came from the Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection program, created when voters agreed in 1987 and again in 1990 to set aside a portion of property taxes to preserve pristine lands.

It was the first major purchase with ELAPP money of land that would need to be restored to its former glory. Working with 17 government agencies and civic groups, a plan was crafted to do just that.

"What I really enjoy is the restoration," said Forest Turbiville, who overseas the management of all the county's ELAPP property. "You're taking land that has been altered and cleared and you're able to take that back and turn it into productive wildlife habitat."

Sullivan's fishing hole was one of the first major undertakings within the preserve. At one time as deep as 22 feet, it could not sustain plant life that provides oxygen and nursery grounds for fish.

Workers filled it back in, built in contours on the lagoon flooring to mimic the randomness of nature, added artificial reefs and poisoned pepper trees, replacing them with natives. The average depth is closer to 3 or 4 feet, with holes as deep as 10, letting sunlight filter through to the plants that sustain life.

Old mosquito ditches connect the lagoon with Little Cockroach Bay and introduce the tide, fish and mangrove propagules.

That was eight years ago.

Today, red mangroves line the shoreline of the lagoon, their tentaclelike roots reaching out over the water. Behind them stand black mangroves, their stalagmitic roots poking up from the sand.

"Not a mangrove was planted in back here," Sullivan said, "and look how many of them there are now."

Birds are everywhere, too - ospreys, egrets, cormorants, ibis, anhingas and a host of littler fellows. Kingfishers make their staccato call as they circle from their perch out over the water.

And, of course, there are the fish. In addition to snook and both black and red drum, there are mangrove snapper, Nile perch, trout, the occasional tarpon and, during the winter in particular, goliath grouper.

Sullivan and the others working on the property are seeking to replicate the success on a series of freshwater marshes and saltwater lagoons, and the uplands they are reconstructing around them. It still looks like a work in progress from Gulf City Road, where the preserve office is.

They have filed one former shell pit with dredge material from the Alafia River. Threatened least terns have made it a nesting area, and dozens of huge white pelicans are wintering there.

Volunteers recently planted more than 25,000 marsh grass clumps around a future tidal creek that currently resembles a series of puddles where bobcats, coyotes and armadillos can be spotted taking a sip. And 8,260 baby trees and shrubs, from wax myrtle to gallberry, were planted in another upland area that was formerly farmland south of Cockroach Bay Road.

The scientists here are building a natural museum of sorts. With more and more people moving to Florida, projects like the Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve may one day represent the last of Florida's truly natural areas.

"If you take the long view of the state of Florida, I cannot stress enough how important these public land acquisition programs are," Henningsen said. "They may be the salvation of any functioning ecosystem we have."

Bill Varian can be reached at 226-3387 or varian@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 5, 2006, 18:20:05]