Travel into Florida Scrub

Hi all! I hope you enjoyed my poster on "The effects of habitat management on Southeastern American Kestrel provisioning rate". This blog serves as a way for viewers to immerse themselves into the wonders and hardships that come with conducting research in a Florida Scrub Habitat.

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Glad you could make it! My name is Eric Trotman, I am a rising 4th year international student from Barbados studying Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida.  In the summer of 2019 I had the amazing opportunity, thanks to the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program, to work alongside Meghan Beatty a current PhD student on her work with a Florida subspecies called the Southeastern American kestrel. This work although grueling at times, helped me to realize my passion for behavioral ecology and all the possibilities that come with it.  If you want to connect or just follow my ecology path feel free to check out my twitter at https://twitter.com/EricMTrotman

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Small but mighty. These are a few pictures that showcase the beauty of this species. We used to say that they were judging us from their high perches, they probably were. 

Photos taken by Geena Hill

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Meet the team!

Left, bottom central is Meghan Beatty, she led the various field work projects. Meghan is currently conducting snail kite surveys in the Everglades and broader Florida region. 

Left, top left is Herby Zephir another DDCSP scholar who also produced a poster for ESA focusing on nest boxes. 

Left, top center is Jacob Hornfeldt another DDCSP scholar who also produced a poster for ESA focusing on invertebrates found in the scrub. 

Left, top right is me (Eric Trotman), if you are here you’ve probably already seen my poster, thank you!

The right picture shows James Petersen a field technician who was helping Meghan out before and after we joined the team. 

Thank you to everyone who made the scrub a bit more bearable. 

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One part of the project included conducting point counts to survey for birds other than kestrels in the forest. 

This video was taken at one such point location and you can see and hear Florida scrub jay angrily calling at us to move away. We assumed that they most likely had a nest in the area. We were out of there as quickly as possible so as to cause the least amount of disturbance. 

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We used a telescope to watch the kestrels feeding activity for 3 hours from approximately 200m away. Paying close attention to where we set up, to reduce the risk of our presence altering their behavior. 

As you can tell, I’m not the greatest at taking pictures through the scope. 

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For Jacob’s project we used a beat stick and net to collect invertebrate species from vegetation at breast height. We classified the specimens to order, recorded the data and left them in the scrub. 

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We had many encounters with some really magnificent critters. Some quite dangerous and some just trying to cross the road like that gopher tortoise. 

Imagine walking through the scrub and finding one of those spiders in your hair. 

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Ocala National Forests’ scrub habitat is managed in patchy mosaic of clearcuts and prescribed burns. 

This management creates areas which are at various levels in their successional stage, because of this, sometimes the only thing you had to deal with in when hiking through the habitat was the 90-100 degree fahrenheit heat. Though sometimes we weren’t so lucky and ended up having to push and weave our way through thick vegetation that towered over our heads. 

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Sometimes vegetation was so dense that we had to use “marco/polo call and answer” to orient ourselves in the right position for vegetation surveys. Of course while still using the gps and compass. 

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Much like the scrub vegetation. The snags the kestrels used to nest in varied greatly. 

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These pictures were taken from the nest cam by placing the camera in their nest cavity using a long pole. We used these pictures to tell how many chicks were in the nest, and to estimate how old they were. 

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Although our fledging success rate was relatively high, in every ecosystem there are loses. This was one of our marked nests where the snag fell over and the nest was abandoned. We predict that they were probably predated as the only thing we could find were eggshells. 

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The sandy roads the we drove along while scoping out new nests and used to get to and from our various survey sites. 

Photos by Geena Hill 

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you for interacting with this blog. If you have any questions about any of the pictures, the project itself or my research feel free to connect with me on twitter at https://twitter.com/EricMTrotman