Land deal gives wildlife room to roam

A conservation group's deal for acres in Pinhook Swamp creates a corridor bigger than Rhode Island for wildlife.

By CRAIG PITTMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 24, 2001

In a swamp so tough that pioneers thought it belonged to the devil, a conservation group has cut a deal with a timber company to create the largest wildlife corridor east of the Mississippi River.

The Nature Conservancy announced Tuesday that it had brokered a deal involving two state agencies and Rayonier Inc. for more than 50,000 acres of the Pinhook Swamp about 50 miles northwest of Jacksonville.

The Pinhook purchase will link the 157,000 acres of Osceola National Forest south of Pinhook with the 400,000 acres of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to the north of it in Georgia. Adjoining the Okefenokee are the 35,700 acres of Georgia's Dixon Memorial State Forest.

Linking them all together makes an unbroken expanse of wilderness bigger than Rhode Island. The terrain is so rough that the pioneers named one area "The Devil's Cup and Saucer" and dubbed another "Impassable Bay."

"This has been the missing piece of the puzzle," said Ed Kuester of the state Department of Environmental Protection, which tentatively approved the deal Tuesday.

Kuester said the Pinhook purchase does more than just create one gigantic corridor for wildlife. He said it will also pave the way for a complicated land swap between the state and federal governments, involving other properties around the state and including the federally owned mineral rights under the Withlacoochee State Forest near Brooksville.

The Rayonier purchase will put 57,379 acres of Pinhook into public ownership, more than doubling the amount of Pinhook land that the state and federal government have acquired in the past decade.

So far the government has bought just 55,000 acres, not enough to link together the Osceola forest and Okefenokee refuge. The effort has dragged because of problems with funding and a lack of public recognition of the little-known swamp.

The Rayonier deal still needs formal approval from the state Cabinet, the St. Johns River Water Management District, the board of the Nature Conservancy and the directors of Rayonier. Until the contracts are signed, state officials said they cannot legally reveal the price tag. But Nature Conservancy officials said it was in the millions.

Rayonier officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday. The proposed sale marks a distinct turnaround from 1999, when Rayonier bought the Pinhook property as part of a 980,000-acre deal with Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. for $725-million. At the time, Rayonier officials said they would evaluate all of the timberland for possible development.

Nature Conservancy officials began negotiating with Rayonier 10 months ago to work out a way to preserve the swampland, said Betsy Donley, assistant director of the conservancy in Florida, and discovered "they were willing to entertain offers. We all have our bottom lines."

For environmental groups, Pinhook is worth pursuing in its own right. Its wetlands provide the headwaters to both the Suwannee and St. Marys rivers. And while it is largely inhospitable to man, Pinhook is prime habitat for black bears, bobcats, sandhill cranes, red-cockaded woodpeckers and other animals running out of room in the Southeast.

There already is a free flow of wildlife between the Georgia and Florida ends of the corridor. Red-cockaded woodpeckers born in Osceola have nested in Okefenokee and vice versa. University researchers have found hundreds of black bears traversing Pinhook, sometimes wandering north to the Georgia swamp or south to the national forest.

A 1988 aerial survey for the Nature Conservancy found rare sections of ancient cypress and longleaf pine untouched by widespread logging throughout North Florida in the early 1900s. Biologists speculate there may be areas of Pinhook with plant or insect species as yet unknown to science.

In a news release Tuesday, Nature Conservancy officials praised Rayonier for taking care of the land. But Rayonier has frequently drawn something other than praise from environmental groups.

Activists have repeatedly criticized the company, which processes wood pulp for use in photographic film and pharmaceuticals, for its daily discharge of million of gallons of industrial waste into the Amelia River near Fernandina Beach. In 1998, Florida Public Interest Research Group named Rayonier the worst polluter in the state.

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this story.

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