Editor’s note: In partnership with the Florida Trident, Central Florida Public Media (previously 90.7 WMFE), and WGCU Public Media, Oviedo Community News is taking a deep look at what the Florida Wildlife Corridor does and doesn’t mean for our community. Below is the first installment of OCN’s three-part series, part of a special, statewide collaboration called: “Preserve or Develop? The Race Against Time to Protect Florida’s Wildlife Corridor.”
Less than an hour’s drive northwest of Oviedo, just parallel to a well-traveled two-lane road in Lake County sits a quiet and empty trail pockmarked with bones.
Walking along the trail in early March, puddles dot the relatively nondescript and muddy pathway in the Seminole Forest from a rainstorm the night before. Damp leaves softly crunch under foot, and the sound of cars on the road just a few dozen feet away is muffled by trees and trenches, but still break up the chirping of the birds.
There is nothing stopping visitors from the open, wet field ahead. No signs or fencing, and definitely no people. But officials don’t want the public disturbing what lies not more than 50 yards farther.
Welcome to one of Florida’s bear boneyards.
Scattered throughout the open field and into the trees lay countless bear bones: large leg bones, pelvic bones, vertebrae, skull bones and more. Hundreds of them. There are even, at times, entire bear carcasses.
There’s no attempt to hide them. There’s no pungent odor of death as one may expect, just the smell of damp foliage. These bones have been here a while.
If you’ve never heard about the boneyard, you’re not alone. Officials and conservationists throughout the state are unaware of its existence, as well.
“I would be mortified if I heard about that and knew about that,” Seminole County Commissioner Bob Dallari said. “I mean, that’s just wrong.”
Julie Morris, executive director of the Florida Conservation Group, is similarly shocked.
“Why are there bear bones in one location?” she said. “That makes zero sense to me.”
Even those who work in conservation in the surrounding area are baffled.
“I did not know that was there,” Jane Hepting, Lake County Conservation Council president, said. “I know [the area] somewhat, but I did not know there was a boneyard.”
There are dozens of similar sites throughout the state, used for multiple species such as deer, hogs, and, of course, bears, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). The FWC’s bear management staff maintains about 15 sites that are in proximity to bear populations. An average of 350 bear deaths are documented annually in the state, and most are transported to these sites, according to FWC. The vast majority of Florida bear deaths result from vehicle collisions on roads. In 2023, it was more than 85% of them.
These animals use the connected land that makes up the Florida Wildlife Corridor to migrate throughout the state, but continued development threatens their movement and introduces more human-to-animal clashes. That includes crossing roads that may not have been in the way before.
Seminole and its neighboring counties are home to tens of thousands of acres inside the Wildlife Corridor, including Seminole County’s own rural area.
Included in this were the vital 1,361 remaining acres of the Yarborough Ranch property in Geneva, which was recently acquired by the state through the Florida Forever program, and will be purchased for $34.5 million, closing off a key part of the Corridor to development. There had been a proposal in place that could have added 300 homes to the land if sold to a developer.
“Allowing those 300 sprawl houses to be built in the middle of [the] Wildlife Corridor and habitat would have dealt the death blow to Seminole [County’s] rural wildlife populations,” said Katrina Shadix, executive director of environmental and wildlife organization Bear Warriors United. “When the state purchased the Yarborough property, that saved millions of lives, from bears and bats to butterflies and bees.”
The lives were saved by preventing what new development in the Corridor can lead to: shrunken native habitats, according to officials and others working on the front lines of conservation in the state.
“Most of the mortalities associated with these carcasses are bears that have been hit and killed by vehicles, but also include bears humanely euthanized due to sickness or injury, as well as bears that are humanely killed by biologists because they posed a risk to public safety,” FWC said in a statement to Oviedo Community News, adding that the boneyards serve to allow the carcasses to feed other wildlife and enrich the habitat.
The site was active from 2002 to 2022, according to FWC, which said that the locations are not disclosed to deter illegal activity.
If you feel threatened by a bear, observe a sick, injured, dead or orphaned bear, or to report someone who is either harming bears or intentionally feeding them, contact the FWC Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-3922. To learn more about bears and how to avoid conflicts with them, visit MyFWC.com/Bear or BearWise.org.
FWC doesn’t just dump the animals in the locations. They do conduct necropsies — or animal autopsies — to collect additional information about the bears.
“Wildlife managers are faced with limited options when it comes to the disposal of large animal carcasses like deer, hogs and bears,” FWC said in its statement. “By exposing these carcasses to the elements on public conservation lands, the bears are effectively returned to the resource for the benefit of both wildlife and the habitat.”
This could become an even more familiar scene across Florida if development continues on and around the land these and other animals use to migrate.
There are still acres of land within the corridor throughout both east and west Seminole County that remain unprotected, as identified by the map below.
“More sprawl development means less forests and more houses, which means more roads, which means more bears dying by vehicle strikes and more bear bodies needing to be disposed of,” Shadix said. “It will become much more common than it is now to be hiking in the woods and come across hundreds of bones and bear carcasses.”
A pressing example of the battle between conservation and development is in the Split Oak Forest in nearby Orange and Osceola counties, a sprawling, 1,700-acre area inside the Corridor teeming with biodiversity, from its ancient scrub lands and open pine forest, to its basin marshes and 11 animal species listed as endangered or threatened.
RELATED: Why the Florida Wildlife Corridor couldn't save Split Oak Forest
Split Oak is a reference site, making it one of the state’s highest-quality examples of natural communities, like scrubby flatwoods, according to the Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI).
On May 1, FWC commissioners approved a hotly debated proposal by the Central Florida Expressway Authority for a planned toll road to be built through some of Split Oak. This would remove decades-old conservation easement protections from 60 Split Oak acres in exchange for a mitigation package of 1,550 adjacent acres — much of which are wetlands and not similar to the acreage it is replacing — and millions of dollars for restoration and management.
“They’ll have a lot more contributions to the bear graveyards if that toll road goes through Split Oak,” Shadix said.
A race against time
Whether it is the need for more homes and subdivisions, or new roads being built through previously undeveloped land to compensate for a growing population, millions of acres are at stake in this race between development and preservation, as nearly 1,000 people move to the state daily, according to Florida’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research.
“We’re one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, [and] we have biological resources that are found no place else,” Morris, from the Florida Conservation Group, said. “[The biggest threats to conservation include] habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, intensification of land uses. We have an intact, connected landscape in Florida of natural and agricultural lands that is under serious threat of intensification.
“We have a brief window in time to try to protect as much as we can,” she said. “You can definitely say it’s a race against time. You could say we have a short window.”
Municipalities must use the state’s population projections when planning for building densities to ensure those residents, plus current residents, have ample places to live and recreate, enough schools, and sufficient city services such as water, sewer and police and fire protection. They must also consider roads, environmental protections and financial sustainability. Many are looking to grow up, rather than out to protect against sprawl. For instance, in the city of Oviedo’s most recently adopted comprehensive plan, most of the anticipated population growth is planned for its downtown cores.
And the threats aren’t just more bear boneyards. They are potentially even more alarming: lasting impacts to the health of the land and residents — both animal and human.
From wetland impact and water quality, according to Morris, to the cutoff of key migration areas for various species of animals, development can impact people, plants and wildlife throughout the state.
Those fighting for conservation, like Morris and many others, are unsure — though optimistic — about how the race will finish.
“I know we’re going to lose some pieces that will hurt. I know that we’re not going to get every piece stitched together, but I’m an optimist,” said Jason Lauritsen, chief conservation officer for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.
The Wildlife Corridor
The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a network of close to 18 million connected acres — 10 million of which are protected conservation lands — throughout the state, winding from the northwestern edge of the panhandle to the southern tip of the Everglades, and includes significant areas of Central Florida, and Seminole County specifically.
This acreage plays a crucial role in freely allowing wildlife migration, which ensures a healthy habitat across the state. Among the species that rely on it are “131 imperiled animals, including the Florida panther, gopher tortoise, manatee, burrowing owl, red-cockaded woodpecker, swallow-tailed kite, and black bear,” according to the Foundation’s website.
This benefits not only the animals and plants inside the Corridor, but the environment, by “reducing greenhouse gasses and guarding against the impacts of increased temperatures,” according to the Foundation.
It is based off of the Florida Ecological Greenways Network. Initially completed in 1998 by the Office of Greenways and Trails in conjunction with the University of Florida, it has been updated multiple times since its creation.
“What the Florida Wildlife Corridor did was bring this vision to the general public and to the decision-makers in Tallahassee,” Morris said.
The vision mainly is in the form of maps that clearly show the connected migration pathways, and paint a picture of which lands need to be protected throughout the state, giving lawmakers a guide for acquisition decisions.
RELATED: Preserve or Develop? The Race Against Time to Protect Florida’s Wildlife Corridor
Continued development, however, threatens the remaining acreage that does not get acquired by the state or other entities that plan to keep it in conservation.
“Once development has happened, I mean, it’s done,” Phyllis Hall, president of the Seminole Audubon Society, said. “You’ve got to hold off development. That’s the purpose of preservation, to hold off the development, because once it’s developed, you don’t get it back.”
And that is a big problem, especially as Florida continues to build homes, communities and more to accommodate its ever-growing population. While some development will always occur to keep up with growth, where and how it is done can greatly affect its impact.
Since the 2020-21 fiscal year, more than 2,200 single-family homes have been built in unincorporated Seminole County as of March, according to data provided by county officials. This does not include duplexes, apartments or mobile homes or the development in incorporated cities. While there is rural acreage included in unincorporated areas, there are pockets of unincorporated land throughout the county, including within urban areas and cities, as well.
Just more than 350 units have been built in Winter Springs since May 2020, according to city officials. The city of Oviedo did not produce housing numbers by press time.
FWC predicts the state’s population nearly doubling over the next five decades. This would mean “about 7 million additional acres of land — equivalent to the state of Vermont — could be converted from rural and natural to urban uses. Nearly 3 million acres of existing agricultural lands and 2.7 million acres of native habitats will be claimed by roads, shopping malls and subdivisions,” according to FWC’s Wildlife 2060 report.
“The addition of 18 million new residents to Florida will intensely heighten the competition between wildlife and humans for land and water resources. More than 1.6 million acres of woodland habitat may be lost and wetland habitats will become more isolated and degraded. For the most part, the animals and fish that currently live in these habitats will disappear,” according to the report.
