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Last Piece Of The Puzzle

Tribune photo by ROBERT BURKE

Patrick Milam has finally sold his 20-acre parcel of land to ELAPP. The property is at the south end of the 53 acre Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve.

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By YVETTE C. HAMMETT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 13, 2008

SUN CITY - There was a time when Pat Milam envisioned a retirement home on the 53 acres he once owned along the edge of Cockroach Bay.

He envisioned a quiet life on the outer fringe where most visitors sport feathers or four legs and evenings are backlit by an orange-pink sun setting over Tampa Bay.

When illness came knocking, though, plans changed. Milam sold the land last year to Hillsborough County's Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program. But, not before returning it to its former glory.

His knowledge of the land quickly surfaces as he hikes across the damp sand, past flowering milkweed and St. John's wort, cabbage palms and the black mangroves that line a rare salt tern, where fiddler crabs skitter and on some evenings, coyotes prowl.

Milam names the plants on the land. He talks about the importance of the soil and tells of the millions of invasive Brazilian peppers he removed to return the land to the way Mother Nature intended.

And he talks about the history of the land and the area around it, known historically as Gulf City.

"Gulf City was, at one time, a place where pirates and wreckers hung out," Milam said, referring to those who would raid occupied ships to steal their booty and to those who would help themselves to the bounty left in the wake of a shipwreck.

"From Gulf City, there was access to the bay," he said, admitting that in years past, he's searched for some of the buried treasure the pirates may have left behind.

Milam contends that the 53-acre tract was once owned by descendants of a pirate named Moye, who ran with the legendary Jose Gaspar, known to many in these parts as the Spanish pirate Gasparilla.

The history record is sketchy, Milam admits, but legend is that Moye escaped the ship when the authorities caught up with Gasparilla in Tampa Bay.

Moye made his way to Gulf City, where he established a family. His descendants, Milam said, lived on the 53 acres at the southern end of what is now the Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve.

A tiny cabin, built there around the turn of the 20th century, still stands amid the cabbage palms and wildflowers. Before selling the land to the county for preservation, Milam propped up the cabin and replaced the roof. He capped off an artesian well he thinks must have run freely on the land for about 40 years.

And he cleared out the invasive Brazilian peppers that had virtually swallowed up the natural shoreline.

The property was nearly impenetrable when Milam purchased it in 2002, so thick with peppers, he had to stoop down to walk the land.

"I literally parted the Brazilian peppers and the cabin was right in front of me," he recalled recently, on his first trip back since selling the land to ELAPP. It is the last remaining chunk the county hoped to add to the 992 acres of uplands that make up the preserve.

But, he said, if he had to sell it, he feels good about selling it to ELAPP, a program that will use the land as an example of what Tampa Bay's fringe once looked like up and down the coast.

"It's the last connection on the coastal corridor that runs from Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve south to the Manatee County line," said Hillsborough County Conservation Manager Ross Dickerson. "It helps connect the entire corridor."

Richard Sullivan, who manages the aquatic preserve, said he couldn't be happier to have it.

"All these native plants came back on their own after Pat cleared this property," Sullivan said, walking with Milam across the expanse of soggy ground, filled with native grasses, ferns and trees. "This is the way it is supposed to look."

The rarest habitat on the property, the salt tern, is a large sandy flat that invites the high tide in, then holds it for a while. The sun evaporates the water, leaving crystallized salt on the surface.

"It's like a moonscape, only better because stuff can live here," Sullivan said. "It's an incredibly hostile salty atmosphere and there's hardly any left at all."

But it's not so hostile as to be untapped by wildlife. Nighthawks and black-necked stilts nest among the driftwood.

Killdeer scrape the sand, then tuck their eggs near the succulent green and red salt wort that sprawls across the white sand.

Fiddler crabs are in abundance, marching in and out of the black mangrove roots, ducking into convenient holes.

When it's wet, fish and crabs use the shallows as a feeding ground and fish spawn there.

Of the 44,700 acres purchased through the taxpayer-funded ELAPP program, only a small portion of six preserves is salt tern, Dickerson said.

As money and manpower become available, this unusual habitat will be open to the public.

Sullivan said he hopes to add a trail along the edge of the salt tern, so nature enthusiasts - most of whom have never seen such a habitat - can observe it firsthand without trampling its wonder.

Dickerson said ELAPP plans to put a trail system throughout the aquatic preserve, once restoration is complete. "It should be within the next two years."

Reporter Yvette C. Hammett can be reached at (813) 865-1566 or yhammett@tampatrib.com. To see more photos from the 53-acre site, go to southshore.TBO .com.

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