Fanning Springs State Park

10/11/2026

10/11/2026

09/22/2026

🍂 Happy First Day of Fall! 🍂

According to the calendar, it’s officially fall today.

According to the heat index… absolutely not.

With temperatures feeling like the upper 90s, Fanning Springs is celebrating the first day of fall the only way Florida knows how—with sunshine, swimming, and plenty of spring water!

Happy Fall, y’all! 🍁

09/20/2026

Who knows what this is? 👀

09/19/2026

Florida’s Love Bug Season: What’s Really Going On?

If you’ve spent any time outside in North Florida lately, you’ve probably noticed that the love bugs are having their moment.

They may be one of Florida’s most annoying seasonal visitors, but there’s more to these little insects than swarms on your windshield.

Did you know that love bugs spend most of their lives out of sight?

Female love bugs lay hundreds of eggs in soil and decaying vegetation. The eggs hatch after a few weeks, and the larvae spend months living in the soil and feeding on decomposing organic material. This helps break down dead vegetation and return nutrients to the ecosystem.

Eventually, they emerge as adults. North Florida typically gets two major love bug seasons each year — spring and late summer/early fall. The adults only stick around for a relatively short time before completing their life cycle and disappearing again.

Adult love bugs feed on nectar from flowers, and while they’re visiting flowers they can contribute to pollination. They also become food for birds, dragonflies, spiders, and many other animals.

So those clouds of love bugs aren’t just a nuisance. They’re part of the natural cycle happening around us — helping recycle nutrients, providing food for wildlife, and playing a small role in pollination.

They’ll be gone before you know it, and the next time you see them, you might look at them a little differently.

Nature has a way of making even the most annoying creatures important.

(Although we’re still allowed to be annoyed when they cover the windshield.)

09/16/2026

Did you know Lake City wasn’t always called Lake City?

Long before it became the Lake City we know today, the community was known as Alligator — and yes, that really was its official name.

The settlement grew around an earlier Seminole village known as Alligator Town, and by the 1800s, the growing community had adopted the name Alligator. For a time, the name even appeared on maps, documents and mail.

There was a brief attempt to call the town Lancaster, but the name Alligator returned. It wasn’t until 1859 that the community was officially renamed Lake City.

And the reason for the name change has become part of local folklore. One story claims that residents simply wanted a more respectable-sounding name, while another colorful version says a prominent woman objected to living in a town called Alligator. The exact reason is a little harder to pin down historically.

What makes it even more interesting is that old maps and letters can still be found bearing the name Alligator, Florida, even though we now know the place as Lake City.

So the next time you drive through Lake City, remember: you’re traveling through a town that once went by the rather unforgettable name of Alligator.

09/10/2026

🙌🏻🤞🏻

09/10/2026

“The District received beneficial rainfall during the month of August that helped us cut into our drought. The Districtwide average was 9.45 inches of rain - compared to the long-term average of 7.65 inches - with some areas of Dixie and Levy counties receiving more than 18 inches of rain. This helped improve our groundwater deficit, but we still need substantial rainfall to bring the District as a whole back into the normal groundwater range, especially in our eastern region.

More information can be found at the District's monthly Hydrologic Conditions Report. https://www.mysuwanneeriver.com/m/newsflash/home/detail/1033 “

09/09/2026

Florida has plenty of stories about invasive species we can’t seem to get rid of.

This is the story of one we actually did.

And wildlife officials found them in a pretty clever way.

The African Sacred Ibis is a striking white-and-black wading bird native to Africa. It looks similar enough to our native White Ibis that you might not give one a second glance.

But Sacred Ibises didn’t belong in Florida.

After Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, Sacred Ibises escaped captivity. Other birds may have escaped from private collections as well. Over the following years, they began showing up around South Florida — and eventually they started breeding.

That was a problem.

Sacred Ibises have become invasive in other parts of the world, and they aren’t harmless additions to a wetland. They can prey on the eggs and chicks of other birds and compete with native wading birds. By the time Florida realized it had a developing population, officials had a choice: deal with a relatively small number of birds now, or potentially deal with thousands later.

So in 2008, Zoo Miami, USDA Wildlife Services and other partners began an eradication effort.

That’s where the story gets interesting.

The first two Sacred Ibises they caught weren’t simply removed.

They were turned into scouts.

Researchers fitted the two birds with wing tags and 70-gram GPS transmitter backpacks and released them. Then they watched where they went.

The plan worked.

The GPS data showed that the birds were spending their nights on an island at the Calusa Country Club, about seven miles north of Zoo Miami.

And by following those two birds, wildlife officials discovered a larger group of Sacred Ibises in the Kendall area.

The birds had unknowingly led researchers straight to their own colony.

From there, the operation expanded. Reports from wildlife workers, birders and the public helped locate other birds around South Florida.

By the end of the effort, 78 Sacred Ibises had been removed.

Thirty-three were captured alive. Those birds were surgically pinioned so they could no longer fly and were placed in accredited zoological facilities.

Another 45 were lethally removed from five locations.

A few stragglers appeared afterward. Two more were found and removed in 2009, and two were reported and removed in 2011. But the breeding population was gone.

And it stayed gone.

The eradication of the African Sacred Ibis in South Florida is now considered a rare invasive-species success story. Florida caught the problem early enough, before the birds had spread across the state and their numbers had exploded.

Considering our ongoing battles with Burmese pythons, tegus, iguanas, lionfish and countless other introduced species, that’s pretty remarkable.