Trail cameras let you spy on Florida wildlife, just like the experts do. Here’s how.
There are dozens upon dozens of hidden trail cameras set up around South Florida’s wilderness areas by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Until recently, only state biologist had access to the candid photos, but now you, too, can spy on the critters.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has dozens and dozens of trail cameras set up around South Florida’s wilderness areas in order to collect wildlife intel. Until recently, only state biologists had access to the candid photos, but now you, too, can spy on the critters.
A new program called Everglades Wildlife Watch lets you sift through thousands of photos to identify what types of animals are meandering in front of the trail cams. Bears, Florida panthers, bobcats, sandhill cranes, deer, owls, hawks, feral hogs — they’re all on display in their private moments when they don’t know anyone’s watching.
The current set of 12,000 photos come from trail cams in the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor just west of Broward and Palm Beach counties, and from the DuPuis Wildlife Environmental Area, west of Jupiter.
The FWC said it’ll be uploading another 25,000 photos next week from wildlife management areas such as Rotenberger, J.W. Corbett, Holey Land and Big Cypress.
To participate, to go the Everglades Wildlife Watch website, which is hosted on the Zooniverse, create a free account and start identifying the wildlife.
On the right side of the image there’s a handy field guide with other FWC photos of the mostly likely species.
When looking at the pics you can zoom or swap to a negative image, making dark appear light, to find hard-to-spot animals.
Sometimes there’s nothing in the photo, but other times you’ll hit the jackpot — a mama raccoon and a baby tiptoeing through a swamp.
Identifying the animals is a crowdsourcing process, and users can comment on each photo.
Once you’ve identified an animal you can share comments on what you think it is, or what it’s up to.
If you get tired of identifying animals, you can head to the Collect page, where FWC biologists have already ID’d animals and compiled images in species-specific collections.
The “Join In” button takes you to a page with popular tags — another way to look at collections of a specific species. You can also create a favorites list.
The FWC said it will eventually have a data dashboard where you’ll be able to see what species you’ve classified and which wildlife management area it lives in. It said by teaming up with the public to categorize their thousands of photos, it will be able to more quickly create reliable data about South Florida’s wildlife populations.
In addition to classifying trail-cam photos, the FWC said it also is looking for volunteers in the South region to help them deploy cameras in wilderness areas, and maintain them. Anyone interested can email Volunteer@MyFWC.com and put “Everglades Wildlife Watch” in the subject line.
“With your help, we will be able to sort through more photos than we ever could alone and gain a better understanding of how animals are using our WMAs,” said the FWC in a release.
Below, a few of the shots we really enjoyed.
Flying squirrel
A bobcat chasing deer in DuPuis wildlife area
A little blue heron and a great egret stalk the same pond
Florida panther
Red-shouldered hawk
Black bear
Sandhill crane
Bobcat pondering a clearing
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.