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Not quite living in the trees, but close

A suspended walkway is possible in the Brooker Creek Preserve, providing quite a view from the top.

By THERESA BLACKWELL
Published June 20, 2006

EAST LAKE - Plans are afoot for yet another project in the Brooker Creek Preserve - one 40 feet in the air.

A forest canopy walkway, suspended on cables between two towers, is Bruce Rinker's dream for the preserve. In a place as flat as Pinellas County, the walkway would give residents a rare opportunity to go vertical.

"It changes your whole perspective on the forest and your place in it," said Rinker, Pinellas County's environmental lands division director. "Suddenly, you see the big picture."

The project is in its early stages, needs funding and might not take place for years. But in a preliminary drawing that Rinker recently passed around to the Friends of the Brooker Creek Preserve, the project would include two towers with staircases: a 55-foot entry tower and a 75-foot tower.

A springy walkway would be suspended on cables between the two towers and two supporting structures that would not be connected to the trees. Forty feet in the air, the walkway would take explorers through the middle of the tree canopy.

"Why is it that every kid wants a tree house?'' he said. It's because we feel at home up in the trees.

Rinker should know. He is a canopy ecologist who wrote Canopy Ecology with Meg Lowman, an environmental studies professor at Sarasota's New College. The two are among those featured in the National Geographic documentary Heroes of the High Frontier, filmed in 1996 in the treetops of French Guyana.

Plans for the Brooker Creek Preserve's environmental education center, which opened in 2004, included an observation tower, but funds ran out before it could be built.

If Rinker succeeds in getting a canopy walkway built, it would be only the second in Florida, he said. The other is at Sarasota's Myakka River State Park.

"It's something people 'Ooh' and 'Aah' over when they get up there,'' said Diane Dutcher, assistant park manager. "They are looking out over a 38,000-acre park.''

Before residents look out over the 8,300 acres of the Brooker Creek Preserve, the project will have to go through a lot of hoops, Assistant County Administrator Liz Warren said.

The walkway has been submitted as a proposed project for 2010 to 2020 Penny for Pinellas funding and will be considered at a County Commission meeting July 25. Rinker estimated the cost at $250,000, but that could go up as the cost of lumber rises.

A good location might be somewhere near the environmental education center in a hardwood swamp, Rinker said. Pine flatwoods wouldn't be good because they sometimes burn.

Warren said the county risk management department would look at safety issues, and she would like to have the county's new Environmental Science Forum and the Friends of Brooker Creek Preserve weigh in on the project. The county also might survey users of the preserve to see whether they like the idea.

"I think it has a definite educational and possibly a research component to it,'' she said.

On a Brooker Creek walkway, visitors would learn about ecosystems in the lively food factory called photosynthesis. They would see insects feeding on leaves and birds feeding on insects. And researchers would have access for studying the trees and wildlife.

Rinker built a canopy walkway in the Hudson Valley of New York, where he was the head of the science department at a preparatory high school.

One spring, he was up on the walkway when a flock of tropical scarlet tanagers, rose-breasted grosbeaks and warblers swarmed him, even landed on him.

"When you get into the treetops," he said, "they no longer see us as predatory.''

[Last modified June 19, 2006, 22:46:30]