Florida's Fragile Wildlife

Rating:
Summary: Helping and accommodating Florida's wildlife
Review: This well written book, should be useful for both land manager and concerned citizen. For many of Florida's "fragile species", Don presents background natural history research, but most importantly highlights survey and land management methods. For proactive management, this may include the use of fire to manipulate habitat succession, for example to help the gopher tortoise. Wood also sees the opportunity of species coexisting with other land uses, for example caracara and agriculture, or set back distances from eagle nests. He offers some urban strategies such as not feeding sandhill crane, or accommodating burrowing owls. Wood recognized some common problems among the species, such as habitat fragmentation, the need for urban strategies, and the confusion of resident versus winter populations when doing population surveys.

Although the pictures are useful, their use is sometimes uneven. For example, there are three examples of a gopher tortoise burrow, but no picture of salt marsh sparrow habitat. The maps were not always included, e.g., there was no map of the Florida Grasshopper sparrow distribution. I would have also liked some discussion of coastal shorebird and tern species, which would also benefit from human awareness.