Our latest nominee for Florida's Special Places is comes from longtime Francis M. Weston Audubon Society leader Lucy Duncan. Lucy is an avid birder and has nominated Big Sabine Point for Florida's Special Places. Thanks to Lucy and others lovers of natural Florida for working so hard to ensure that special places like Big Sabine Point are protected for the generations to come. Enjoy!
The Big Sabine is a 150-acre parcel of beachfront owned by the University of West Florida (UWF). Situated between Pensacola Beach and Navarre Beach on Santa Rosa Island, comprised of pristine coastal dunes and marsh, sandbars and shallows, it is among Florida’s remaining barrier island expanses – a special place cherished and enjoyed by hikers, kayakers, fishermen, hunters, and birders. And UWF proposes to sell it. Once lost, it cannot be reclaimed.
Big Sabine’s coastal vegetation undulates across dunes reaching northward to Santa Rosa Sound from the roadway that bisects this narrow barrier island. White as sugar, born of eroded granite from the Appalachian Mountains and then carried toward the Gulf of Mexico by creeks and rivers, the quartz crystal sands sing as you walk. The rise of large dunes hosts magnolia, Cherokee plum, palmettos, bayberry, yaupon and live oaks, and looks north across a network of marsh and sinuous inlets. The dunes are beguiling, however, as some are bowl-shaped and harbor a variety of unexpected plants within their sheltered walls.
From a vantage point atop these dunes, you can look out to the shallows and sandbars that encircle the estuary known as the Big Sabine. Shorebirds probe the mudflats in winter while flocks of Redheads and other bay ducks ply the fertile marine grass beds nearby. Reddish Egrets oft comically dance along the shallows while threatened piping plovers feast on invertebrates. On the southwest of the Big Sabine, and also part of the University of West Florida property, a stand of pines holds sentinel shading an understory rich with birdlife. Many pines there are skeletal reminders of Ivan, a category 3 hurricane that swept across this fragile island in 2004 destroying structures and vegetation alike in its fury. Now, a quiet walk through the pines is likely to surprise a Chuck-will’s-widow or Common Nighthawks. A freshwater marsh there echoes in spring with the song of Common Yellowthroats and the Red-wing Blackbird’s kon-ka-reeee.
Once sold and “developed,” there is no going back, no way to reclaim the breathtaking beauty, the open space or the serenity of this special place.
