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Birders are a strange bunch of critters. I can say that because I’m one of them. We tend to carry around enough optical equipment to make the guys that were hunting Osama bin Laden jealous. We think eating breakfast at 3 a.m. in the summer is perfectly normal. We tend to travel…a lot

The Interior Department's 2011 "State of the Birds" report focuses on the importance that national parks, and other public landscapes, provide for hundreds of bird species.

Handling endangered and threatened species and off-road vehicles, scalping campsite reservations, and the interpreting of parks by smartphone are among the things to wonder about in the wake of National Park Week.

With word last week that the Eastern cougar has been declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it leaves just one native panther species alive in the East -- the Florida panther that resides in Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park.

We love our national parks. We love the wildlife they hold, the seashores with their sparkling sands, the forests with their wildlife and hiking trails, the soaring red-rock cliffs and plunging canyons. But please, don't ask us to abide by their regulations.

In a decision surely to draw criticism from conservationists, the National Park Service's Southeast regional director today approved a controversial management plan for the "Addition" lands at Big Cypress National Preserve.

Big Cypress National Preserve is a good winter day outing. The preserve offers hiking, large wading birds, waves of sawgrass and a fantastic photographic gallery. But nothing can top seeing alligators up close.

A conservation group in Florida wants National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis to reject the preferred off-road vehicle plan for the Addition lands in Big Cypress National Preserve. In a lengthy letter the South Florida Wilderness Association urges the director to "take a step that will truly fulfill the lofty language of the Organic Act of 1916" by setting aside more of the landscape for wilderness designation.

Are Big Cypress National Preserve officials going too far in support of off-road vehicle interests?

A promise made decades ago has finally been kept in Florida, where officials have approved the transfer of 29,000 acres of land to Big Cypress National Preserve.

While the superintendent of Big Cypress National Preserve says the final management plan for the "Addition" lands within the preserve "provides for strong natural and cultural resource protection," the plan itself states that the preferred alternative is likely to adversely affect endangered Florida panthers.

A slurry of oil and tar balls roughly 2 miles long and a yard wide from the Deepwater Horizon disaster has been keeping cleanup crews busy at Gulf Islands National Seashore, while other parks in South Florida still have not been impacted.

As millions of gallons of crude oil continue to flow into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the National Park Foundation is mounting a campaign to raise money to help national park units affected by the disaster.

With ocean currents, winds, and weather the powers behind the movements of the sprawling oil slick created by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, personnel at national parks along the Gulf Coast can only watch, wait, and prepare for the worst.