FWC

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is asking Floridians to report all sightings of wild turkeys between now and Aug. 31. This includes hens (with or without poults or young turkeys) and bearded turkeys.

Investigators from the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission unraveled an organized fraud case involving the state's prized Osceola turkey, leading to multiple felony charges against four Southwest Florida individuals.

When Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act into law in the summer of 2021, the occasion was met with a flurry of glowing headlines and general celebration by conservationists across the state. But the effort to protect the integrity of Florida’s landscape is a race against time. It remains entirely legal to develop land within much of the corridor’s boundaries, even if such development would destroy the landscape-scale connectivity the law is meant to preserve. The corridor, in other words, remains under siege by development. And the state and federal governments have not been too eager to stop it.

Fort Myers Police were monitoring a black bear in the area of Broadway and Victoria Avenue in the city Monday morning.Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission officers managed to corral and tranquilize the animal to be transplanted elsewhere.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials hope they are seeing decreased incidents of what are described as “erratically spinning fish” and smalltooth sawfish deaths in the Florida Keys. Gil McRae, director of the commission’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, told commissioners Wednesday that a decrease in incidents of spinning fish the past two weeks could be a sign “we're on the tail end of this event.”

As Florida’s population expands, state wildlife officials have seen a more than 33 percent increase in calls for assistance related to wild animals during the past five years, according to a presentation that could go before the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission this week.

Amid battles in two courts about a 2020 decision by the federal government to shift wetlands-permitting authority to the state, a judge Monday put on hold a lawsuit filed by the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida.U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore approved a request from U.S. Department of Justice attorneys for a stay of the Miccosukee Tribe lawsuit after another federal judge last month ruled that the permitting authority had been improperly transferred to the state and should be vacated.

The carcass of sperm whale that became stranded on a sandbar and died Monday off a Venice-area beach has been towed out to sea.The Sea Tow Venice marine towing service used a heavy towline and rig line, provided by the City of Venice, to take the whale's remains 10-15 miles offshore on Tuesday.

The death of a sperm whale off the Venice coast this morning, while difficult even for marine experts who deal with such things, could be a learning experience for them."Every time you see a whale in distress, like we did yesterday, it's, it's always really hard. It's really hard. And so all we can do is utilize the opportunity to learn as much about them as we can," Laura Engleby, chief of NOAA's Marine Mammal branch, said Monday morning standing on the beach near the whale's carcass. "And then that helps us understand some of the things that we can do to ultimately recover and help them. And so, in that way, that's how we have to think about it. "