Lots of folks I know spend their spare time sitting in Deer stands, with bow, rifle or shotgun at hand. Here's the conversation from earlier this season:

How did it go this morning?

Nothing. No buck. A waste of time.

See anything at all?

Saw the sun come up.

Anything else?

A small doe, didn't want to take her.

See anything else?

A Hawk buzzed past my head.

Anything else?

Flock of Wild Turkeys walked by.

Anything else?

A Bobcat. No, two Bobcats.

Anything else?

A Box Turtle walking through the leaves.

What are we waiting for? I don't think I need to explain my parable...

Thanks Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm

From the Gainesville Sun

By Cindy Swirko Staff writer

Big Shoals, a rare bit of Florida whitewater on the Suwannee River north of White Springs, is not exactly raging now.

"I'd describe it as a rock garden with water trickling through it," canoe outfitter Steven Baxter said recently.

The woeful flow at Big Shoals is a symptom of a falling Suwannee River, the upper river is approaching historic low levels because of a lack of rainfall.

The drought is expected to continue through the winter.

From White Springs in Hamilton County south to Dowling Park in Suwannee County, the river is within a fraction of all-time lows, according to data from the Suwannee River Water Management District.

"We have a pretty profound deficit, particularly in upper Suwannee and Santa Fe (River)," said water district hydrologist Megan Wetherington. "As groundwater levels drop, we will see less of a contribution from groundwater and will see more of a decline to historic lows in lower part of the river.

Meanwhile, meteorologist Jason Hess of the National Weather Service in Jacksonville said the long-range forecast is calling for continued dryness thanks to La Niña, a cooling of the Pacific in the equator region.

La Niña has the opposite effect of El Niño, a warming of the Pacific that brought more rain than typical to the region last year.

"We are expecting drier than normal conditions this winter. We have a La Niña event set up in the Pacific, so chances are going to be greater that we have below-normal precipitation from December through February," Hess said. "Right now, the drought conditions and the river levels are expected to continue through the wintertime."

On Thursday, the Suwannee River at White Springs was at 49.6 feet above mean sea level, a sliver above the record of 49.49 feet set in 2007. At Dowling Park, the Suwannee was at 21.8, nearing the record of 21.12 set in 2002.

The Santa Fe River gets a lot of its water from spring-fed groundwater. While it is low, it is not near record lows yet. The Suwannee River below the confluence with the Santa Fe is not as low as the upper Suwannee.

However, Wetherington said if the drought continues and groundwater levels dip, both the Santa Fe and lower Suwannee will continue to drop.

Dropping with the low levels is the business of Suwannee Canoe Outpost, which is located at the Spirit of the Suwannee Park north of Live Oak.

Baxter, the owner, said there is too little water for trips above White Springs. Multi-day trips on the upper Suwannee are not being done.

"At this time of year, we would typically be renting canoes to groups that would do three- to six-day trips from Fargo, Ga., to our place. Those groups aren't doing those trips right now, so a lot of our business tends to be shuttling around people with their own boats who have enough knowledge of paddling and the river," Baxter said.

Low water reduces the current to a near standstill and requires portages around areas with no water.

It recently took 19 days for a group of paddlers to make it from Fargo to White Springs, about 50 miles. The trip ordinarily would take about three to four days.

The lack of rainfall also has heightened fire concerns. Ludie Bond, wildfire mitigation specialist with the Florida Division of Forestry Gainesville office, said the drought is setting the region up for a busy spring wildfire season.

"It's certainly something to pay attention to and take seriously when the meteorologists predict La Niña weather conditions," Bond said. "We know at the Division of Forestry that in the past 17 years, the five most active wildfire seasons came either during or immediately after we had La Niña conditions in the state."

From the Gainesville Sun

By Christopher Curry

A long-lingering application to pump water from wells near Lilly Springs for a bottling operation was unanimously denied Tuesday by the Suwannee River Water Management District Governing Board.

Applicants Richard Corbin and John A. Barley sought to pump 400,000 gallons a day of water from two wells in Gilchrist County, about a half-mile south of Lilly Springs. Corbin and Barley could not be reached for comment.

The wells would have been on a 3.5-acre parcel at Northeast County Road 340 and Northeast 90th Avenue, just across the Alachua County line and southwest of Poe Springs Park.

Governing Board member David Flagg said the application was denied with prejudice, meaning any future application would have to be significantly different to be considered. Flagg said board members approved staff's recommendation of denial with prejudice because the plan was to pump water from within the district boundaries and truck it elsewhere for bottling.

Water management district staff's recommendation of denial stated that the applicants did not show that a pumping operation was a “reasonable-beneficial use” of the resource or “consistent with the public interest.”

Staff stated concerns that the withdrawal would have “unacceptable impacts” on the flow from Hornsby Spring in Alachua County and that the applicants “failed to provide reasonable assurances” that environmental harm would not be done to other area springs, wetlands, the Santa Fe River and Poe Springs Nature Park.

Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, president of the Our Santa Fe River, an environmental group formed to fight this application and other proposed water bottling operations, said she was “very pleased” with the denial and, in particular, the rationale for it.

“The staff gave the board good information, and the board took that information and denied the permit because it was not a reasonable and beneficial use and not in the public interest,” Malwitz-Jipson said. “That's huge. It was based on very important issues that are often overlooked when considering these types of permits. The citizens do not want these (bottling operations).”

A business plan previously submitted by Corbin and Barley stated the water would be transported off site in tanker trucks and possibly sold through Panther Creek Inc., a spring water brokerage firm based in the Liberty County municipality of Telogia.

From the Florida Independent

By Virginia Chamlee

Dozens of politicians, lobbyists and industry heads have written to both the EPA and Congress to argue against new water quality standards that would force many big utilities and agricultural companies to reduce the amount of waste they dump in Florida’s waterbodies. Their argument? The rules would be far too costly to follow for industries in a state already grappling with record high unemployment.

But according to internal Department of Environmental Protection emails obtained by The Florida Independent, the extravagant cost estimates regularly cited by Florida leaders were crafted by an industry-dominated organization, and were routinely disputed within the department.

Florida waterways have been suffering from ineffective pollution standards in recent months. In addition to drastic reductions in wetlands, many estuaries and lakes have been inundated with blue-green algal blooms that release toxins and use up large amounts of oxygen — leading to fish deaths, bird deaths and possibly even mammal deaths. Scientists recently labeled a rash of dolphin deaths in the St. Johns River a “marine mammal unusual mortality event,” one of only 50 such events to occur nationwide in the past 20 years.

Currently, Florida relies on a narrative water quality standard, the wording of which (.pdf) has been criticized as too vague to be effective. The rule reads, ”In no case shall nutrient concentrations of a body of water be altered so as to cause an imbalance in natural populations of aquatic flora or fauna.”

The new proposed criteria would be more site-specific, more strict and, according to industry representatives, extremely costly. But where exactly are these cost projections coming from? And are they accurate?

The EPA has estimated the cost of implementing the criteria at around $130 million, but representatives for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection — the agency in charge of drafting the criteria — have argued otherwise.

During a September River Summit held in Jacksonville, the department’s Darryl Joyner fired back at the EPA. “The EPA has significantly underestimated costs,” he said. “We think the cost will be somewhere between $5 and $8 billion. … In fact, I’ve seen some models that suggest the cost to be closer to $50 billion.”

Rod Reardon, an engineer with Carollo Engineers, mentioned his company’s projected costs in an August hearing on the nutrient standards, held in Tallahassee. Kurt Spitzer, executive director of the Florida Stormwater Association, told Sunshine State News that he thought costs would be closer to $200 billion.

One model that projects costs to be upwards of $8 billion was completed by Carollo Engineers for the Florida Water Environment Association, a nonprofit corporation that describes itself as “committed to the preservation and enhancement of the global water environment.”

According to its website, the FWEA’s Utility Board is comprised of a host of industry names, and includes representatives of some of Florida’s most notorious polluters.

JEA, well known for being the St. Johns River’s no. 1 point-source polluter, is represented on the board by both Scott Kelley and Paul Steinbrecher. Steinbrecher, who acts as the Utility Board’s president, has been outspoken in his opposition to the nutrient criteria, and has been quoted several times saying that water bills could skyrocket once the criteria are implemented.

Other members of the board include Jessica Weatherby of Jones Edmunds, a consulting firm specializing in waste water treatment plants, and Elizabeth Perez of the environmental consulting firm Brown and Caldwell. Noted polluter Georgia-Pacific engaged (.pdf) Brown and Caldwell to conduct a study of its plant, which found that a pipeline to reroute effluent directly into the St. Johns River was its only viable option.

The Department of Environmental Protection itself — which has been accused of pandering to industry lobbyists rather than protecting the environment — is also represented, by Fred Rapach.

In a Jan. 26, 2010 email obtained by The Florida Independent through a public records request, department representatives discussed the differences between EPA estimates and those completed by the FWEA. According to the emails, the EPA estimated the annual costs to municipal wastewater treatment facilities to be around $52.9 million, while FWEA estimates ran from $24 to $50 billion in capital costs.

The email, which was written by the department’s Phil Coram and sent to fellow department employees, suggests that the source of the FWEA cost estimate was not clear, and that the estimate was based on all wastewater treatment plants, “regardless of where they discharge” — meaning it included costs from plants that would not be affected by new standards:

As you can see, we believe that the FWEA significantly overestimates the costs for several reasons: 

* They overestimate the number of facilities that will be affected, at least on their high range estimates.

* They do not consider that facilities might switch from surface discharge to other more cost effective forms of wastewater management and disposal, such as reuse or deep wells, and therefore not incur the costs to upgrade to AWT, reverse osmosis, and the use of brine concentrators.

* Some of their math is wrong.

The Department of Environmental Protection did not return calls requesting more information on the FWEA’s estimate.

Jennifer Hecker, a policy manager for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, calls industry cost projections “substantially overblown.” Hecker says that the Department of Environmental Protection has shifted its focus from doing the right thing for the environment to doing the right thing for polluting industries, and the cost projections reflect that.

“People think that these are all independent entities creating these cost-projection reports, but it’s actually the industries being affected by this,” Hecker says. “Obviously, industry isn’t going to embrace anything that could potentially drive its costs up. To put nutrients into a waterbody is very cheap. To remove them is expensive.”

Hecker says that the issue is a confusing one for most Floridians, who simply don’t understand the complex science behind it. Recent reports of big jumps in utility prices have surely turned many off, but are they even legitimate?

According to Hecker, utility leaders toss around big numbers, but leave out important information when making their claims. Many of the projections make assumptions that all treatment plants will have to start using reverse osmosis, but Hecker says this isn’t so. “There is flexibility in the system that people don’t understand,” she says.

Hecker also points out that polluters will have 15 years to achieve compliance. “It’s not like anyone is going to be blindsided,” she says. “The costs are literally spread over decades.”

The underlying issue, according to environmentalists like Hecker, is that Florida thrives on its ecology, specifically its water. The gulf oil spill revealed just how inextricably linked the state’s environment and economy really are.

“This problem grew out of control because current standards are ineffective,” says Hecker, “and if it keeps spiraling out of control, taxpayers will have to shoulder the costs. … If we do nothing, we are degrading the very thing that draws people to Florida. It’s not just sunshine that Florida has to offer, it’s water. It’s in our economic interests to make progress on this. Why hasn’t anyone done a cost projection on what happens if we don’timplement the standards?”

Awesome!!!!

The Santa Fe River 

 By Virginia Chamlee of the Florida Indepenent

In the wake of a historic election cycle, Floridians are left wondering what will change in coming weeks, months and years for a state besieged by high unemployment and other, perhaps less publicized problems facing the state, like degrading wetlands and heavily polluted waters. What can we expect in the way of environmental policy from an all-GOP cabinet and legislature?

Newly elected Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam has been outspoken about his view that proposed EPA standards for how much waste can be dumped into Florida waters would be too costly to implement.

Governer-elect Rick Scott has also spoken out against the criteria. In a meeting with the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, Scott told the board of directors that he would “not advocate anything that would keep [them] from doing business.”

From the association’s newsletter, The Harvester:

On EPA’s proposed numeric nutrient criteria for Florida waters, Scott said the federal government should not be dictating water quality standards. … Putnam referred to the unfairness of EPA’s proposed numeric nutrient criteria for Florida waterways, saying that they are not based on science and put North and Central Florida at a disadvantage with the rest of the country and with South Florida, where the standards will be delayed for a year. The EPA has since delayed implementation of the standards for 30 days.

Lately, pressure from industry heads and politicians has been somewhat effective; both the freshwater and saltwater criteria have been delayed already. But, according to Florida Department of Environmental Protection Press Officer Dee Ann Miller, Florida government officials can only go so far in their fight against the criteria.

“This is a federal rulemaking set pursuant to procedures by the Environmental Protection Agency,” she says. “Ultimately, the regulations are set by the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. As such, state government entities are not part of the official decision making process on the regulations. State government officials and organizations can comment (and have commented) on the regulation as part of EPA’s procedures.”

Environmental heads have already begun to make their stance on the midterm elections known. Kyle Ash, senior legislative representative for Greenpeace USA, issued a statement on the congressional elections:

Industry dollars have made a mockery of democracy in America, polluting not only our air, water and communities, but nearly every political campaign. Dirty energy magnates like the Koch brothers spent more of their fortunes, earned on the backs of American communities, to elect congressional candidates who will support their destructive profit motives. …

Although many Senators- and Representatives-elect have professed horrifying positions on the protection of endangered species, our national parks, and even basic rights of Americans to live in a clean environment, they have also maintained a commitment to fiscal responsibility. If these positions are genuine, the newly elected should slash the billions of taxpayer dollars wasted every year in subsidies for wealthy coal and oil companies like BP.

Ash also said that House Speaker-to-be John Boehner should be held accountable for implementing harsher standards on pollution, and that newly elected politicians in general need to practice what they preach:

In this election, we have repeatedly heard damaging rhetoric about fundamental environmental protections. Now is not the time for knee-jerk reactions on matters of such import and urgency to the health of our nation. No matter where it comes from, we need leadership to defend our environment from what are sure to be vicious industry attacks in the coming year

On an airboat on Lake Okeechobee, four University of Florida researchers prepare to launch an airplane — by hand.

They check its altitude and attitude, turn the 11-pound plane side to side, lift its nose and lower it. They test wind speed, direction, the plane’s GPS system and autopilot.

“Three … 2 …1,” the plane gets a shove from doctoral candidate John Perry and it’s airborne, flying in laptop computer-controlled patterns over the lake. Passing about 650 feet overhead, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner from a neighbor’s home. Farther off, it makes no noise at all. When it lands next to the airboat a half-hour later, it barely makes a splash.

The plane is the result of a decade’s worth of work by a multidisciplinary research team headquartered at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. There has been a near-constant honing of what’s called the Unmanned Aerial System before researchers settled on today’s aircraft, which is durable, watertight, and takes incredibly sharp GPS-pinpointed photographs.

Later, those photographs create elaborately detailed maps, which provide data not available anywhere else for scientific research. In this case, the goal is to help gather information on plant life, but researchers say the tiny plane offers a vastly safer and more accurate way to conduct all kinds of environmental monitoring.

Despite its high gee-whiz quotient, said Larry Taylor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, what’s important isn’t how nifty a gadget the plane is: It’s what it can do.

During the 30-minute flight, the plane takes and stores about 750 photographs. With the help of global positioning technology, the researchers know with startling accuracy the location of the area shown in each photo.

UF’s Matt Burgess, who helps coordinate the team’s activities, returned from a recent Alaska meeting of unmanned aerial systems researchers with the impression that UF leads the nation’s universities in capability to use information gathered from flights of similar types of planes.

The possibilities for this technology to help wildlife biologists are nearly endless, the researchers say. They include being able to count wading birds’ nests or even the eggs inside; counting the alligators in a swamp and documenting landscape components, such as trees or vegetation.

Aquatic vegetation was the focus of the team’s Lake Okeechobee outing. Members sent the plane up to photograph water lettuce and hyacinths left in a roughly ⅓-mile square of lake surface after federal officials used herbicide to thwart the invasive plants six weeks earlier.

There are three flights this day — two taking standard color photographs and a third to get color-infrared images. The only apparent disturbance to nature occurs during one of the landings, which startles a water bird enough to make it scoot to another spot.

The airplane flies using a lithium battery, so there’s no exhaust to pollute the air or hurt wildlife.

“It’s a green system,” Perry said. “It replaces the alternatives of manned aircraft such as helicopters and low-flying planes, and it produces better data.”

The plane is just a couple of years away from being available for general use, said Franklin Percival of the UF-affiliated Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, who’s led the team since it began.

“We’ve concentrated all these years on the plane and payload, and now we’ve got all of those things right,” he said.

The idea for the work began percolating in Percival’s head in the late 1980s, during a trip with a group of wildlife biologists who were heading into such rough terrain that they had to get there on an airboat led by a helicopter.

“Nobody wanted to fly in that thing. It was hot, and you’re flying [at altitudes] anywhere from 10 feet to 100 feet and it’s dangerous. And I was just thinking, ‘There has got to be a better way of doing this.’”

The project has so many state and federal agencies involved, including UF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, School of Forest Resources and Conservation, and department of wildlife ecology and conservation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, that much of Percival’s work involves keeping the group together and keeping it funded.

He has described the team of students and biologists, as being like a football team “filled with Tim Tebows.”

Taylor, sitting atop a nearby airboat on the morning of the Lake Okeechobee launches, said the plane’s evolution in the last few years is nothing short of miraculous.

“With the previous airframe, it was like, ‘Please, God, let it get back down,’” he said. “But this one is just completely different. We’re really fortunate … the talent we’ve got on this team is just nuts.”

View Coyote sightings in a larger map

Click Image To Enlarge

From the Gainesville Sun

By Lise Fisher
Staff writer

More residents of the Gainesville area have reported coyote sightings after reading a story in The Sun about a local neighborhood on Northwest 37th Street off Northwest 39th Avenue where several cats have disappeared and people have seen and heard coyotes.This map shows the sightings reported to The Sun so far. Sightings with photos included are marked with a red placemark.

If you want to report a coyote sighting, send an e-mail to fisherl@gvillesun.com and include information about where and when the coyote was seen. If you have a digital photo, send it, too.

Prepare for the Super Harvest Moon! For the first time in two decades, the Sun will sink as the full Moon rises exactly opposite to it on the day the summer ends, creating in a strange 360-degree twilight show.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, today is the autumnal equinox and a Super Harvest Moon will cross the sky after almost 20 years since the last time it happened. When the Sun starts to set on the Western horizon, a full moon will rise opposite to it on the East, reflecting the light of our home star.

Being close to the horizon, the orange Moon will be gigantic thanks to a psychological effect called the Moon illusion. The sky will be illuminated by the Sun and the Moon at the same time, creating a weird 360-degree effect that is rarely seen.

You don't need to do anything special to enjoy the show, just get ready for the sunset. Make sure to have a clear view to both East and West.

Locally the event will happen at 6:54pm..

And as an added bonus, when the summer ends at 11:09pm Eastern Time, Jupiter will appear right next to the Moon.