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Yes. The Florida black bear is the only bear in the state, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates there are about 4,050 of them.
They live in seven groups: around Eglin in the western Panhandle, the Apalachicola country in the eastern Panhandle, the Osceola National Forest along the Georgia line, Chassahowitzka on the Big Bend coast, the Ocala National Forest in the middle of the peninsula, Highlands and Glades counties, and Big Cypress in the southwest. Between them they now range over about half of Florida. A grown male usually weighs 250 to 350 pounds and a female 130 to 180. Seeing one is not a problem in itself, the commission says; the trouble starts with food. Keep garbage, pet food and bird seed where a bear cannot get at them.
Marion County. It is also the southernmost in the continental United States, and what it protects is not the pine flatwoods most of Florida is covered in. Roughly two hundred thousand acres of it is the Big Scrub, the largest stand of sand pine anywhere in the world, growing on old dune sand so dry and poor that almost nothing else will take.
Open the guide →Liberty County. Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed it on May 13, 1936, and the ranger district offices are at Bristol and Crawfordville. Inside it are interior swamps, longleaf pine flatwoods, titi thickets and part of the Woodville Karst Plain, drained by the Sopchoppy, the Ochlockonee and the Apalachicola.
Open the guide →Baker County. President Herbert Hoover proclaimed the forest on July 10, 1931. It covers roughly 200,000 acres of northeast Florida across parts of Baker, Columbia, Bradford and Hamilton counties, about fifty miles west of Jacksonville, and most of it is pine flatwoods broken by cypress and hardwood swamp.
Open the guide →Collier County. Big Cypress and Big Thicket in Texas were designated the same year, creating a new category in the National Park System: land protected but still open to hunting, to off-road vehicles under permit, and to traditional use by the Miccosukee and the Seminole, who hold permanent rights to occupy and use it.
Open the guide →Alligators are in fresh and brackish water in all 67 counties, so the question is where you can watch them safely from dry land.
Read the answer →In the wild, rarely, and almost only in Southwest Florida. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission puts the population at about 120 to 230 adults, and most of the breeding animals, the females especially, live south of the Caloosahatchee River.
Yes, and more of them lately. American flamingos were native to Florida, gathering by the hundreds and thousands in the Everglades and Florida Bay, until the feather trade of the late 1800s nearly wiped them out.
About fifty native kinds, and only six of them are venomous: the eastern coral snake, the southern copperhead, the cottonmouth, the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, the timber rattlesnake and the dusky pygmy rattlesnake.
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