Homeless animals in Florida are becoming our wild neighbors

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — From bobcats to bears and coyotes to monkeys, wild animals are coming into our neighborhoods.

Much of it has to do with the development and rapid growth in our area. But it’s possible to coexist with your wild neighbor.

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Corey Key lives in Etown, a new and growing area of Jacksonville.”I always feel for the animals,” Key said. “When they start cutting down a bunch of trees, they always get pushed out of their natural habitat.”Key’s seen a variety of animals in his backyard – bobcats, deer, alligators, even wild pigs. This is why he says he doesn’t let his dog outside alone.

Other people around town have spotted some unusual wildlife too: coyotes on the Southside, monkeys in St. Johns, and bears in Ponte Verda.

Luckily there’s an effort to find a solution.

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The Florida Wildlife Corridor is a statewide network of connected lands and waters offering animals a place to go. It consists of about 18 million acres of contiguous wilderness throughout the state. The Wetlands Preserve in Putnam County is a big part of it.

“We end up with landscape-scale conservation, where it’s a big enough landscape where the bears which need big wildlife corridors to run through the Florida Panthers, whose ranges expanding in any number of other animals that need more space,” Wetland Preserve LLC Cowonwer Ben Williams said.

It’s why the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission gets involved. But, FWC Bear Program Coordinator Michael Orlando says local governments and voters need to make good decisions.”If you want to have, you know, smart growth, less development, that’s a community decision,” Orlando said.

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St. Johns is one of our faster-growing counties. Last year, it issued more than 44,000 total permits. We’re only halfway through the year, and there are already 34,000 permits. “We have passionate people that are ready to protect the wildlife and their habitats,” St. Johns County Director of Public Affairs Wayne Larson said

.Larson says environmental surveys are required before any work starts.”St. Johns County has a very robust, purposeful program in place to work with developers, but more importantly, to protect the habitats and the animals, that that development might impact,” Larson said.

Some animals are relocated, like the gopher tortoise. This year so far, the FWC has issued nearly 1,000 gopher tortoise relocation permits statewide.

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But not all wildlife is moved. Bears are not relocated. So, if they don’t migrate somewhere else, we must prepare to live among them.”Bears are extremely adaptable, so they don’t have to just live in the woods all the time,” Orlando said.

Orlando encourages people to live responsibly. One way is to lock up your garbage.”They’re smart enough to be lazy,” Orlando said. “And so if you put a half-eaten pizza in your garbage, a bear could get all the calories it needs in one day one sitting in one garbage can.”

Ben Williams says the key thing to remember – don’t feed them.”Animals need to be treated as wild animals and not as pets,” Williams said. “They need to be encouraged to leave us alone. And we need to leave them alone and have a healthy respect for them.”To learn more about how to protect animals, you can visit the FWC website.

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