The tree was massive. Wider than multiple human arm-lengths, the 300-500 year old Live Oak in Bulow Creek State Park – known as the Fairchild Oak – stretched its branches high and wide at the edge of a small, grassy clearing. One particular branch, covered in fern epiphytes, had extended so far from the trunk…
Author: Erika Zambello
Erika Zambello is a writer, birder, and photographer living and working along the Emerald Coast of Florida. She has a master’s degree in environmental management, where she specialized in ecosystem science and conservation. Her love of the outdoors was inspired by a childhood in Maine, where she returned for her National Geographic Young Explorer grant. In addition to Maine, she has lived in New York, France, Washington, DC, and North Carolina. Erika believes in the power of communicating conservation and exploration, which was the inspiration for One World, Two Feet.
Nat Geo – Military-Civilian Partnership Brings New Oyster Reef to Northwest Florida
The air reverberated with clinking noises and the whoosh of oyster shells sliding off giant piles into waiting buckets. Volunteers, Choctawhatchee Basin Alliance (CBA) staff and their AmeriCorps team gathered the shells in mesh bags, slowly building another mound of new reef material. As they worked, a truck pulled in with even more shells, collected from nearby…
Voices for Biodiversity – Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve
Established in 1999, the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (GB NERR) now stretches across 18,000 acres. In addition to the estuary’s salt marshes, the reserve also covers rare pine savannas, full of blooming wildflowers and carnivorous plants. Read the rest on Voices for Biodiversity!
E. Zambello Writing and Art 