Weather: Very few clouds
Brooker Creek is the largest park in Pinellas County coming in at over 8,000 acres! We went to this park to observe the pine flatlands, hammocks, wetland swamps that it had to offer. We first started our observations on the flatwoods trail where we first walked on a board walk over the wetlands that we were introduced to. I could see duckweed floating all over the water that was still and not flowing. This first ecosystem was a forested wetland.
Once we got off of the boardwalk we were walking on very fine white (almost bleached) sand and no longer needing a boardwalk since we were in a completely different elevation! As we were walking on the trail on one side it was a completly flat land of saw palmetto's, grasses, and other plants. But looking on the other side it was a thick hammock. The reason two ecosystems are so different yet in the same area is because of fire!
The side with the more open area with saw palmettos everywhere is an area where the park has prescribed burns every 5-10 years to help the ecosystem remain stable. If you do not have fire than the flatland will turn into a hammock.
Burn markings on the bottom of a tree trunk
A really cool thing I found in on the trail was a bandanna tied onto a pole. To show an example of how much elevation matters in an ecosystem the tied a bandanna on a pole at the top and just a few yards up the trail there was another pole with a bandanna tied at the same elevation of the first. You could clearly see you were at a higher elevation and as you looked around the plants that you would find at the lower elevation either adapted or were no longer present. We changed to a dry oak hammock ecosystem with a slight change in higher elevation.
<---First pole
The father we walked the more the ecosystems changed. Eventually we got to the most fun (and muddy) part of the field trip, the Blackwater cutoff! The ecosystem then changed back to a swampy wetland.
Fortunately, no water moccasins were spotted!!! Phew!
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