A vision of Old Florida

Take an hour to trek through the St. Joseph Bay Buffer Preserve for a taste of Old Florida.

Spend a day walking its newly-marked trails to fully soak in one of the last natural stretches of coastal Florida in the Panhandle.

“It is really important for people to realize what they have and support it,” said Jean Huffman, a member of the Friends of the Buffer Preserve and former preserve manager. “The best way to support it is to get to know it.

“It’s open, it is free. You can come back here by foot, by bike, by horse. It’s available and it is open.”

And there are challenges.

State budget cuts have meant that the office managing the St. Joseph Bay Aquatic Preserve has closed and Huffman’s last day as buffer preserve manager was May 31. The position has yet to be filled, so Huffman continues to work with the Friends group as she continues her doctoral studies on forest fire history.

The St. Joseph Bay Buffer Preserve is, as an example, a textbook for the work that has transpired the past eight years as Huffman has used prescribed burns to improve the health of the preserve’s 5,000 acres, the 21 rare or endangered species of flora that grow there and to make the preserve more accessible to the public.

“It’s fire prevention, wildfire prevention,” Huffman said of much of her work using prescribed burns to reduce the fuel on the preserve lands while encouraging the growth of native species, such as Florida Blue Curls, Tropical wax weed or Chapman’s Rhododendron.

“Prescribed burning reduces the chances for wildfires out here. And burns are essential to the ecosystem.”

The impact on the prescribed burns – the burning season ended as the weather warmed and summer arrived – is dramatic. On one side of a road, recently burned acreage is in sharp contrast to the other side, burned last year and now on a full comeback to being the long-leaf pine savannah of its natural state.

The burning also boosts the prospects for the plants that thrive and exist only at the buffer preserve. Such plants bloom and flourish when on a wetlands edge, the divining line between coast and uplands.

Burning out the underbrush and forest residue carves out that coastal edge where the plants bloom when in season.

“We have 21 rare species of plants on the buffer preserve and for four or five of them this is the only place in the world where they are protected,” Huffman said. “This is a very unique ecosystem.”

One that includes some bears, an alligator or two, catfish and the return of quail, as just some examples of the animals that roam the preserve.

And Dr. Joe Collins from the Center for North American Herpetology has been surveying the snakes and lizards on the preserve for more than a decade.

“This is one piece of old Florida along this coast that is the original Florida,” Huffman said. “This is an important natural area.”

The work in recent months, beyond the prescribed burns, has been increasing public accessibility to the buffer preserve, which is also an important stop for a host of migratory birds.

The Friends group has worked with Huffman on turning old fire plow lines, essentially ditches that once served as fire prevention in the wild spaces, and logging roads into walking trails.

A member of the Friends group, Ted Ruffner of Eastpoint, has taken on the job of demarking the trails and posting wooden signs with designated trail names at trail heads and intersections of trails.

“The Friends group is still active and there is a lot going on,” Huffman said. “We are trying to develop more walking trails. Most of the trails are the old roads, but we are also trying to create new walking trails.

“Ted was all for it and came out and marked the system of trails. The Friends group has been so good.”

A map of the walking trails is available at the Preserve Center located on State 30-A. The Preserve Center is roughly one mile south of Simmons Bayou.