North Beach at Fort De Soto Park near St. Petersburg is well-known as Dr. Beach’s number one beach in 2005. But birding, fishing, and sea-life experts have been calling Fort De Soto Park at the mouth of Tampa Bay “number one” for a long time.
 You beach lovers may be satisfied catching your rays in a setting of crunchy white sand with pleasing background music made by waves and sea oats blowing in the wind. But you should know you are sharing that scene with wild creatures that make their homes and earn their livelihoods in that sand, in the blue-green water, and throughout the various wildlife habitats in this 1,136-acre park.
  Watch for dolphins surfacing for air just beyond the waves. See skimmers slice the smooth water between incoming waves and sanderlings, willets and plovers run for bits of food at the intersection of sand and surf.
  Walking the beach, look for the awkward track of a 250-pound loggerhead that paddled up the sandy slope to lay her eggs. Even if you don’t see the turtle, you may see where park employees fenced off her nest for protection.Â
  Wildlife diversity and quantity are among the 50 criteria used by Dr. Beach — Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman, actually — to determine the best beaches in the country. He gave Fort De Soto’s Gulf beach his highest score in the wildlife category. But long before Dr. Beach announced his pick, wildlife experts in several areas were ranking this Pinellas County park near St. Petersburg at the top.
  Anglers, for example, have noted that the park is located where the Gulf meets Tampa Bay, a situation with geographic and tidal implications that multiplies the size, variety and numbers of sport fish available to hook and line fishermen. There are two productive fishing piers, a gulf pier and a bay pier, that deliver predictably for Spanish mackerel, redfish, snook, and sheepshead anglers
  Park-Wade-Fish
The park is popular with park-wade-fish anglers. Anglers can park their vehicles on the side of the road, gather up their light tackle and wade the mangrove-fringed bays and flats to cast for redfish, speckled trout, and snook. In the spring and summer beach anglers plug for snook feeding in the confused “swash” channel, just a few feet from the sand, where waves break and recede.
  Birders know Fort De Soto Park and its variety of habitats as home to more than 280 bird species at various times of the year, a fact that puts it in bold on Florida’s Great Birding Trail.
  If you walk the beach or the trails on the backside of this barrier island park you’ll see great blue herons; reddish, snowy and great egrets; and roseate spoonbills. Just 100 feet from the bay pier and just a few paces from the parking lot, there is a huge mulberry bush that seems to be the most popular place on the Florida Gulf Coast for migrating birds returning from their wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America. In April, berries red for picking, this bush serves breakfast, lunch and dinner to scarlet tanagers, grosbeaks and indigo buntings arriving hungry from two-thousand mile flights across the Gulf of Mexico. Bring your binoculars. “Hey, I’ve got a female rose breasted grosbeak with berry juice running all down her chest,” said one birder, quite clearly in focus.
  Ray-tossing dolphins
Kayakers have spread the word about Fort De Soto Park’s kayak trail, a 2-miles-plus paddle that takes them through mangrove communities, sea grass beds and oyster bars. (Oysters do grow on trees. You’ll see.) From time to time, you’ll share the trail with dolphins and manatees. Park staffer Mark Gustafson tells the story about the time a colleague watched dolphins tossing a stingray back and forth like a Frisbee. Play or spite? Some speculate the dolphins are merely getting even for the stings they get from the rays while foraging near the bottom.
  Sunbathers will time their visit with the location of the sun. But nature lovers come as early as a half an hour before sunrise or remain until a half an hour after sunset, all the better to watch their special birds, catch a trophy fish, or find a special shell.
  One such shell, not rare but a great find nevertheless, is a shell with a tiny hole drilled in it. “Any of the coquinas, dosinias, surf clams, venus clams and others found with a tiny, smoothly-drilled hole are the victims of a predatory snail,” said Park Naturalist Michael McGoff. “The shell that washed up on the beach was alive when the predator attacked, held it down, bored a hole through its shell with its drill-like tongue, and then ate the animal through the tiny little hole.” You can keep that shell as a reminder that nature is not kind, but is endlessly fascinating.
  Nature is not always kind to loggerhead hatchlings, so humans do what they can to protect them from predators, primarily by fencing off their nests if they find them before the raccoons and other animals. Loggerheads mate offshore. The female hauls out onto the beach several times in the spring and summer, lumbering up the slope to build her nest above the high tide line. Otherwise the eggs will be submerged on a rising tide and die. She uses her rear feet to dig a hole about two feet deep and deposits about 100 and 150 eggs. Baby sea turtles hatch together, usually late at night, and often during a rain, then scurry into the surf. There is some safety (but not a lot) in numbers, in darkness, and wet weather.
  Fort De Soto visitors, including many park campers, come for the fishing, the birding, the mangrove kayaking, the loggerhead-nesting season and, certainly, the prime beach. Fort De Soto Park’s campground offers 238 sites — many right at the water’s edge — to tent, pop-up and RV campers. In addition to all of the natural attractions at the park, campers enjoy conveniences like water and electricity, washers and dryers, showers, grills, picnic tables and even a camp store.
  Fort De Soto Park gets the glory for its top beach ranking but officials of Florida’s Beach point out that excellent beaching, shelling, kayaking, and birding can be found all along the 35-mile Gulf frontage of Florida’s Beach from Tarpon Springs in the north to Pass a Grille and Fort De Soto in the south. Other popular Gulf of Mexico parks in the area include Fred Howard Park in Tarpon Springs and Caladesi Island State Park (number three on the Dr. Beach list) and Honeymoon Island State Parks in Dunedin.
  For more information about the number one beach in the country and all the natural attractions available in the St. Petersburg-Clearwater area, phone 877-352-3224.By: Bill AuCoin / AuCoin & Associates, Inc.
