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Circle B Bar Reserve
The Circle B Bar Reserve is an area of protected lands in Polk County, Florida, United States. Consisting of near Lakeland, the restored wetlands site is managed by the Polk County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), which co-owns it with the Southwest Florida Water Management District. The park was purchased in 2000 for $7.4 million using funds provided by an environmental lands acquisition referendum approved by voters in 1994. Polk's Nature Discovery Center, completed in 2008, features interactive displays about the plants, animals, and ecosystems of the reserve. The center serves as the focus of environmental education programs and explorations for families, school groups, teachers, adults, and other visitors. Construction began in 2007, consisting of four buildings totaling 16,000 square feet at a cost of $6.4 million. Circle B Bar Reserve is named after the cattle ranch that once occupied the site. It was purchased to help maintain the Banana Creek marsh area, home ...
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Polk County, Florida
Polk County () is a County (United States), county located in the Central Florida, central portion of the U.S. state of Florida. The county population was 725,046, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, and estimated to be 818,330, as of July 1, 2023. Its county seat is Bartow, Florida, Bartow, and its largest city is Lakeland, Florida, Lakeland. Polk County comprises the Lakeland–Winter Haven metropolitan statistical area (MSA). This MSA is the List of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, 77th-most populous one and the List of United States primary statistical areas, 89th-most populous United States primary statistical area, primary statistical area of the United States as of July 1, 2012. The center of population of Florida is located in Polk County, near the city of Lake Wales, Florida, Lake Wales. Polk County is home to one public university, one state college, and four private universities. History Early history The first people to inhabit the area now called Polk ...
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Gray Squirrel
Gray squirrel or grey squirrel may refer to several species of squirrel indigenous to North America: *The eastern gray squirrel (''Sciurus carolinensis''), from the eastern United States and southeastern Canada; introduced into the United Kingdom, Ireland, western North America, Italy, and South Africa *The western gray squirrel (''Sciurus griseus''), from the western United States *The Arizona gray squirrel (''Sciurus arizonensis''), from the southwestern United States and adjacent Mexico *The Mexican gray squirrel (''Sciurus aureogaster''), from southern Mexico and Guatemala; introduced into the Florida Keys {{Animal common name Sciurus ...
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Southwest Florida Water Management District Reserves
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A ''compass rose'' is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each separated by 90 degrees, and secondarily divided by four ordinal (intercardinal) directions—northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest—each located halfway between two cardinal directions. Some disciplines such as meteorology and navigation further divide the compass with additional azimuths. Within European tradition, a fully defined compass has 32 "points" (and any finer subdivisions are described in fractions of points). Compass points or compass directions are valuable in that they allow a user to refer to a specific azimuth in a colloquial fashion, without having to compute or remember degrees. Designations The names of the compass point directions follow these rules: 8-wind compass rose * The four cardinal directio ...
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Protected Areas Of Polk County, Florida
Protection is any measure taken to guard something against damage caused by outside forces. Protection can be provided to physical objects, including organisms, to systems, and to intangible things like civil and political rights. Although the mechanisms for providing protection vary widely, the basic meaning of the term remains the same. This is illustrated by an explanation found in a manual on electrical wiring: Some kind of protection is a characteristic of all life, as living things have evolved at least some protective mechanisms to counter damaging environmental phenomena, such as ultraviolet light. Biological membranes such as bark on trees and skin on animals offer protection from various threats, with skin playing a key role in protecting organisms against pathogens and excessive water loss. Additional structures like scales and hair offer further protection from the elements and from predators, with some animals having features such as spines or camouflage servi ...
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Circle B Bar Reserve Walking Trail June 2024
A circle is a shape consisting of all points in a plane that are at a given distance from a given point, the centre. The distance between any point of the circle and the centre is called the radius. The length of a line segment connecting two points on the circle and passing through the centre is called the diameter. A circle bounds a region of the plane called a disc. The circle has been known since before the beginning of recorded history. Natural circles are common, such as the full moon or a slice of round fruit. The circle is the basis for the wheel, which, with related inventions such as gears, makes much of modern machinery possible. In mathematics, the study of the circle has helped inspire the development of geometry, astronomy and calculus. Terminology * Annulus: a ring-shaped object, the region bounded by two concentric circles. * Arc: any connected part of a circle. Specifying two end points of an arc and a centre allows for two arcs that together make up a ...
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Bartow, Florida
Bartow ( ) is a city and the county seat of Polk County, Florida, Polk County, Florida, United States. Founded in 1851 as Fort Blount, the city was renamed in honor of Francis S. Bartow, the first brigade commander of the Confederate Army to die in combat during the American Civil War. It is part of the Lakeland, Florida, Lakeland−Winter Haven, Florida, Winter Haven Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area, Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had an estimated population of 787,404, as of July 1, 2022. According to the 2020 Census, the city had a population of 19,309. Located near the source of the Peace River (Florida), Peace River, Bartow is approximately east of Tampa, Florida and southwest of the Greater Orlando, Greater Orlando area. The city is near the center of "Lightning Alley" and has frequent afternoon thunderstorms in the summer, but typically has sunny and mild winters. Government, mining, and agriculture are the major sectors of the area's e ...
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Fort Fraser Trail
The Fort Fraser Trail is a paved multi-use path that runs from Bartow to Lakeland. It runs along a former Atlantic Coast Line Railroad line that once ran from Lakeland to Naples. The southern terminus of the trail can be accessed from North Wilson Avenue in Bartow, immediately north of Tractor Supply Company. The northern terminus is at the entrance to the Polk State College (Lakeland) campus in Lakeland. A paved extension of the trail runs to the Circle B Bar Reserve The Circle B Bar Reserve is an area of protected lands in Polk County, Florida, United States. Consisting of near Lakeland, the restored wetlands site is managed by the Polk County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), which co-owns it with th ... in Lakeland, a park run by Polk County, the Southwest Florida Water Management District, and the State of Florida, where several additional s of unpaved trails traverse the property and provide access to Lake Hancock. Most of the trail parallel's US Highway 9 ...
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Florida Fish And Wildlife Conservation Commission
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is a Florida government agency founded in 1999 and headquartered in Tallahassee. It manages and regulates the state's fish and wildlife resources, and enforces related laws. Officers are managers, researchers, and support personnel, and perform law enforcement in the course of their duties. History In 1998, an amendment to the Florida Constitution approved the establishment of the FWC with a headquarters in Tallahassee, the state capital, on July 1, 1999. It resulted from a merger between three former offices, namely the Marine Fisheries Commission, Division of Marine Resources, the former Florida Marine Patrol, and the Division of Law Enforcement of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and all of the employees and commissioners of the former Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection since then serves as the environmental regulatory agency for ...
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Great Florida Birding Trail
Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail (''GFBWT'') is a 2,000 mile (3200 km) long collection of more than 500 locations in the U.S. state of Florida where the state's bird habitats are protected. The trail promotes birdwatching, environmental education and ecotourism. The GFBWT is a program of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, supported in part by the Florida Department of Transportation and the Wildlife Foundation of Florida. It is modeled after the successful Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail. Trail sites area identifiable by prominent road signs bearing the Swallow-tailed kite logo. The trail is divided into four sections (Panhandle, West, Eastern, and South) each containing at least two 'gateway' sites. Within each section the sites are grouped into clusters. Usually the sites in a cluster are within an hour's drive of each other. Many of the state's 514 species can be found along the trail, including the roseate spoonbill, limpkin, swallow-taile ...
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Wild Hog
A feral pig is a pig, domestic pig which has gone feral, meaning it lives in the wild. The term feral pig has also been applied to wild boars, which can interbreed with domestic pigs. They are found mostly in the Americas and Australia. Razorback and wild hog are sometimes used in the United States in reference to feral pigs or boar–pig hybrids. Definition A feral organism, feral pig is a domestic pig that has escaped or been released into the wild, and is living more or less as a wild animal, or one that is descended from such animals. Zoologists generally exclude from the ''feral'' category animals that, although captive, were genuinely wild before they escaped. Accordingly, Eurasian wild boar, released or escaped into habitats where they are not native, such as in North America, are not generally considered feral, although they may interbreed with feral pigs. Likewise, reintroduced wild boars in Western Europe are also not considered feral, despite the fact that they were ...
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North American River Otter
The North American river otter (''Lontra canadensis''), also known as the northern river otter and river otter, is a semiaquatic mammal that endemism, lives only on the North American continent throughout most of Canada, along the coasts of the United States and its inland waterways. An adult North American river otter can weigh between . The river otter is protected and insulated by a thick, water-repellent coat of fur. The North American river otter, a member of the subfamily Lutrinae in the weasel family (Mustelidae), is equally versatile in the water and on land. It establishes a burrow close to the water's edge in river, lake, swamp, coastal shoreline, tidal flat, or estuary ecosystems. The den typically has many tunnel openings, one of which generally allows the otter to enter and exit the body of water. Female North American river otters give birth in these burrows, producing litters of one to six young. North American river otters, like most predators, prey upon the most ...
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Snake
Snakes are elongated limbless reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (). Cladistically squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales much like other members of the group. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors and relatives, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads ( cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most only have one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, althoug ...
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