A Living Sanctuary

Bay County’s East Bay hides a bounty of pristine shorelines, black-water bayous, and a natural sanctuary as diverse as any in the country.

by David Hanson
photography by Michael Hanson

Sweet Tea Journal (Spring/Summer 2006) – The glassy, calm, black water of East Bay’s Sandy Creek tributary slowly begins to show signs of ripples. A slight breeze stirs up, and the once thick shrubs and trees lining the narrow bayou begin to thin, revealing a blue sky broken by tall, slender pine trees. A snowy egret stands on twiglike legs, its round body a jolt of white on this canvas of muted greens, blues, and browns. The boat moves a little further, rounds a bend, and there it is—the wide-open expanse of East Bay, a living sanctuary for hundreds of birds, land mammals, plants, and marine life, and a natural haven for the few residents and visitors in this untouched tract of Northwest Florida.

Calmly sitting at the small boat’s steering wheel, feet propped up as comfortably as if he were in his recliner, fishing guide Roy Ray directs the boat into the open water. He talks about Bay County’s East Bay like he’s showing you around his house. His trimmed white beard makes him look younger than his seventy years, but the sun’s wear and tear on his hands and arms speaks to years on small fishing boats under the Florida sun.

“Here’s Polecat Bayou. There used to be a bridge connecting these little spits, and if you head back in that cove you’ll find a great spot to catch redfish when the tide’s up and they’re coming in,” he says. “Out here, along this sandy spit’s where I ran into a bunch of speckled trout one time.”

Ray grew up with a backyard of bays, bayous, wetlands, and pine forests. Although it’s all St. Andrews Bay, the distinction between North, West, and East bays remains important. Ray’s family was spread along both sides of a canal in West Bay, where spats over which side was better often arose. Ray now lives near North Bay, but he’s become even more enamored of East Bay, where he guides almost daily and where he hosts a locally aired fishing show each morning. “This is my favorite bay,” he says. “The fishing’s great and hardly anybody knows about it. Back in these woods you’ll find all sorts of wildlife, and just look at all this pristine coastline.”

Florida’s Panhandle region stretches from Tallahassee west to the Alabama state line. Most folks in the Deep South, from Birmingham to Atlanta to Jackson, Mississippi, rave about the area’s miles of snowy sand beaches so white it hurts the eyes. The crystal-clear waters draw comparisons to the Caribbean or a tropical destination hundreds, even thousands of miles away.

But the pristine beauty—the places where you can get lost and feel small compared to the surrounding environment—hides behind the long strip of famous white sand that welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Despite its close proximity, St. Andrews Bay, of which East Bay is a part, seems itself a world away from the busy hub of Panama City Beach. The bay, at 107 square miles, spreads itself around and away from the historic downtown of Panama City, extending west, north, and east.

Looking at a map, you see the vast expanses of open water with ribbonlike tributaries tapering into the surrounding land. These freshwater rivers and creeks gather their water from the wetlands, land surface, and groundwater such as rainfall. It’s this influx of freshwater into a saltwater-dominated bay that defines the requirements for an estuarine environment and that helps make it so vital to a healthy marine system.

Estuaries are the warm, secure, nutrient-rich kindergartens where representatives of more than ninety-five percent of Florida’s recreationally and commercially important fish spend a portion of their lives. Physically, an estuary, usually in the form of a bay or lagoon, requires a semi-enclosed area that allows for tidal input and output. But because that tidal influx comes much more gently than the crashing waves on a beach, an estuary offers special protection for many species in the early stages of their lives. And because of the dynamic nature of the environment—in which constant tidal shifts countered by freshwater influxes from tributaries allow for multiple shifts in salinity, temperature, and sunlight each day—estuaries offer a mixing pot of inland/freshwater and marine nutrient resources that is one of the most fertile types of natural landscapes in the world.

At 69,000 total acres, the St. Andrews Bay complex is a relatively small estuarine environment. Of the four bays, East Bay accounts for roughly less than a quarter of that environment, or about 15,000 acres. Yet it is one of the most species-diverse sections of St. Andrews Bay, due in part to its location amid the remote eastern region. Indeed, East Bay hosts a wide variety of fish, mammal, and bird species. Trout, mullet, grouper, redfish, sheepshead, spiny lobster, shrimp, crabs, oysters, and clams provide a quick glimpse into the abundance of the bay’s estuarine fisheries.

The list continues beyond the menu of the local seafood shack. Hundreds of species of plants and animals—including a bevy of nesting shorebirds, birds of prey, and endangered green sea turtles and threatened loggerheads—rely on the vast food supply of the East Bay estuary. In recent summers, the presence of manatees, migrating from their winter homes in the southern half of peninsular Florida to summer destinations farther up the east coast, has increased. Although annual mortality rates have doubled in the past ten years, the manatee population currently is estimated at 3,142 for the entire state. These animals are drawn to sanctuaries such as East Bay for the abundance of sea grass (upon which they feed), the relatively protected waters (fewer propeller-driven boats), warm water in summer, and the freshwater input from streams.

Locals like Roy Ray formed their personal connections to East Bay through years spent on its waters, but not many people know the bay’s biologic richness like Dr. Ed Keppner and his wife, Lisa. The two biologists have been studying, surveying, and collecting plant and animal species from East Bay and the surrounding bays for almost two decades. It’s all in a good day’s work for Dr. Keppner, who would rather be in the pine lowlands of East Bay than in the office talking over maps and survey findings.

One of the Keppners’ two botanical inventories in the last decade has shown that, among bays that have been inventoried, St. Andrews Bay is one of the most, if not the most, species-diverse estuaries in the country. They found 309 species of fish in what amounts to a relatively small estuarine environment. And the diversity doesn’t end at the bay’s shores. One of the most exciting discoveries occurred on East Bay’s Lathrop Tract, a blocky peninsula that juts into the southeast corner of the bay near the land owned by Tyndall Air Force Base. In May 2001, Faye Winters of the Bureau of Land Management and Hildreth Cooper of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spotted the red-cockaded woodpecker—a federally endangered species and a threatened species in Florida. It remains the only proven colony in Bay County. The discovery has, according to Dr. Keppner, led to an aggressive initiative to increase the population.

“The red-cockaded woodpecker is a peculiar species,” Dr. Keppner says. “The male dominates the culture, so the females tend to fly off to lands unknown to start new colonies. So experts are trying to bring in more females to create a balance.”

With thousands of undeveloped acres, East Bay has remained relatively untouched. On the south side, Tyndall Air Force Base operates mainly from the interior of a spit of land that separates East Bay from the Gulf. The shoreline along Tyndall is rarely accessed from land. On the north side of the bay, the small communities of Callaway, Cook Bayou, and Allanton account for a fraction of the largely undeveloped land bordering the bay. The St. Joe Company owns the remainder of land surrounding East Bay’s north side (as well as thousands of acres around West and North bays). The company started buying the land some eighty years ago for its paper production business, but in 1997, St. Joe began transforming itself into a developer of high-end residential properties, such as the RiverCamps woodland preserve communities on West and East bays.

This land is wild. If you walk into a pine flatwood forest, ease your canoe up a quiet, black-water tidal creek, or hop off the fishing boat onto a spit of land bordered by a salt marsh, you’ll begin to realize its value, despite—or perhaps because of—its desolate, even inhospitable, appearance. In the forest, the tall, thin pines shoot straight up, their branches waiting until the last minute to reach for sunlight in the canopy. As you continue, the potential for easy travel is deceiving; with little understory tall enough to block sight lines, the scene looks wide open—you can almost see through the pines to the water. At about knee level, however, the dominant ground cover, saw palmetto, fans out its pointy fronds like a herd of frozen, sharply pointed green peacocks on full alert. The native palmetto thrives in the sandy, well-drained soils of East Bay’s upland forests, and its fruit provides food for white-tailed deer and the black bear.

That’s right—the bear. It might surprise some people, and it would draw a gasp of excitement and rush of adrenaline in someone lucky enough to see one, but black bears roam these forests, feeding on palmetto hearts, acorns, berries, insects, and the occasional armadillo or abandoned carrion. As part of the Apalachicola National Forest, East Bay remains a vital bear habitat—home to roughly five hundred bears.

Other threatened species share these forests and wetlands as well. Long burrows beneath the sandy ground may indicate the home of a gopher tortoise—a keystone species, which means its presence supports the existence of numerous other animals that use its underground caverns for shelter, such as the Eastern indigo snake, gopher frogs, mice, foxes, quail, burrowing owls, and many other small mammals and invertebrates. In dense thickets, freshwater swamps, or lagoons, you may encounter the little blue heron, its slate blue body and long, elegant maroon neck and head a regal sight. Keep a sharp eye and ear out for the tiny Marian’s marsh wren or look at the tops of snags (dead, standing trees) for a bald eagle’s nest. Protecting the habitat of these rare species is why conservation easement measures taken by state agencies and landowners are so important here. The state of Florida often will purchase large tracts of land to be preserved in conjunction with the land being developed. This preservation means animals requiring spacious habitats have a better chance of stabilizing or even increasing their populations.

Drawing closer to the water, live oaks—some estimated to be three hundred years old, their branches curling and twisting like knotted muscles—look sturdy beside the swaying pines. As the ground softens, saturated with water, saltbush and wax myrtle appear, leading into the salt marsh where you stop walking and the gray-green expanse of sharply pointed needlerush takes over, its stalks disappearing beneath the water’s surface. The marsh-water-sky expanse is broken by a vivid white oval perched on two skinny legs with a long, slender neck reaching up: another snowy egret.

Beyond the shore, the St. Andrews Bay system, of which East Bay is a part, contains the most substantial sea grass stock in Northwest Florida. The secure, nutrient-rich sea grass meadows support a wide range of marine life, harboring or feeding at some point in their lifespans seventy percent of Florida’s commercial and recreational fish species. The beds also act as a vital filtering system to cleanse incoming and outgoing tidal and fluvial flows.

To discover how East Bay maintains such healthy and diverse plant and animal species, one must go to the source—its small tributary creeks, where tangles of trees crowd over the slow movement of fresh black water heading for the open bay. Here, the opacity of the water promises alligators just below the surface dotted with green lily pads the size of small basketballs. Everything seems to want to get into the water: various hardwoods send their roots directly into the creek, while smooth cordgrass pokes up along the edges and clumps together, forming a wetland adjacent to the stream. These creeks offer the only access into some of the most remote areas in the state. They also provide the key to the health of the East Bay estuary.

The watershed of St. Andrews Bay, meaning the area of land—tributary creeks, springs, forests, roads, towns—from which runoff eventually flows into the bay, is entirely within the state of Florida. Relative to other estuarine bays, St. Andrews’ system lacks a major freshwater river influence, such as one the size of the nearby Apalachicola River. The waters of these smaller creeks and streams carry less sediment, which in turn sets the stage for the unusually clear waters of St. Andrews Bay. For instance, the smaller Sandy Creek, Callaway Creek, and Laird Creek provide East Bay’s freshwater. In North Bay, the clarity of the water is enhanced by its especially clean primary freshwater source, Econfina Creek. (See “Floating the Backcountry,” on page 40.) The Econfina gathers more than sixty percent of its water from the Floridan aquifer, a source so pure it is protected as a Class G-I waters designation, the highest level of quality.

To protect East Bay, Dr. Keppner and Bay County officials have focused primarily on maintaining the quality, quantity, and seasonal distribution of freshwater to the estuaries. “So you protect the tributaries, the flowing water in the watershed,” he says.

One way to achieve this is through public-private cooperation and the establishment of conservation easements. This method allows for a healthy mix of development and preservation. RiverCamps on Sandy Creek in East Bay is a good example of this. Of the 3,000 acres in the development, more than 760 are wetlands. However, as the result of an agreement among St. Joe as developer, environmental groups, and state and local officials, less than one-half acre of wetlands will be filled for the road system, and all residential lots will be placed on uplands. The untouched wetlands will be protected under a conservation easement with the state. “We’re trying to figure out how to protect riparian areas [the natural borders that buffer waterways] without fragmenting them, because the whole system is connected and a healthy interaction between the different zones is vital,” Dr. Keppner explains. “Setting aside large tracts of land for protection is the best way to accomplish this.”

Like Dr. Keppner, Roy Ray has an equally deep, but perhaps less scientific, connection to East Bay, and he’s turned his passion into something of a second career. When he retired from BellSouth, he spent a year doing things he’d wanted to, such as hunting and fishing and taking his time with his morning coffee. But it wasn’t enough for someone who felt so profoundly about this land and the bay it surrounds.

He got to the point where he couldn’t sleep. “I realized I was worrying that I didn’t have anything to worry about anymore. So I told my wife I needed to start doing what I want to do,” Ray recalls.

Shortly thereafter, he started a fishing guiding business that led to his fishing show, which airs each weekday morning at 5:30 a.m. on local station Fox 28. As he calmly steers his little fishing rig out of Cook Bayou Marina and along the rugged northern shore of East Bay, the wind makes his heavy Panhandle accent difficult to understand. But it’s easy to see that he speaks from his heart about this bay and these forests that have been his backyard for a lifetime.

“My daddy was a real outdoorsman,” Ray says. “He took me on my first hunt when I was seven and couldn’t even hold the gun; I had to prop it on a stump before I could shoot. And now, even though I live fifteen miles away, East Bay is my backyard. I love it because … there are so few people out here. The last time I was out there I only saw one boat. You feel like you have the place to yourself.” And in many ways, you do. Looking out over the quiet backwater bayous and shorelines of this pristine area of Northwest Florida, it is easy to understand just how Ray feels.