Big Bend Wildlife Management Area

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The units are Snipe Island, Hickory Mound, Spring Creek, Tide Swamp and Jena, and together they run from the mouth of the Aucilla River down to just past the town of Horseshoe Beach. The land was bought by the Nature Conservancy from the Buckeye Cellulose Corporation in 1986 and taken over by the State of Florida in 1987 through the Conservation and Recreation Lands program. That purchase closed a sixty-mile gap in a two-hundred-mile run of coastline that was already in public hands, which is why this stretch of the Gulf has almost no development on it. The ground is basin swamp, mixed pine and hardwood, and hardwood forest, ending in salt marsh at the water. Hickory Mound holds an impoundment of roughly 1,800 acres of marsh and timberland, created in the middle 1960s when Buckeye Cellulose and the state wildlife agency built a dike across it. Duck hunters, crabbers, anglers and bird watchers all use it. The whole area is a listed site on the Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail, and hunting, fishing, paddling and bicycling are all allowed in season