40 Years of Moccasin Lake Nature Park: A Clearwater Anniversary
It's easy to forget, walking the shaded trails of Moccasin Lake Nature Park, that this land was almost something else entirely. Before the city of Clearwater set it aside as a nature preserve, the site was being considered for low-income housing development. Instead, on August 7, 1982, it opened as a 51-acre (now 54-acre) sanctuary and in 2022, it marked its 40th anniversary.
Forty years is a long time for any green space to survive in Pinellas County, one of the most densely developed counties in the entire state of Florida. Most of the land around Moccasin Lake has been built, paved, and redeveloped multiple times over in that span. The park hasn't which is exactly the point. It exists today specifically because community members, decade after decade, pushed back against the idea that every remaining acre needed to become something denser.
That includes the man-made lake at its center, originally a borrow pit dug in the 1940s during construction of the U.S. 19 overpass, which slowly filled with rainwater and became, improbably, a six-acre habitat now home to alligators, turtles, and wading birds. It includes the raptor sanctuary, added not long after the park opened, which has rehabilitated and housed dozens of birds of prey over four decades. And it includes the volunteers many of whom have been showing up for years, some for decades who keep the trails, gardens, and animal programs running.
Help protect the next 40 years. Donate to Friends of Moccasin Lake →
Original source: tbnweekly.com (Clearwater Beacon), July 2022
