The Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge is part of the United States National Wildlife Refuge System, located in north Key Largo, less than 40 miles (60 km) south of Miami off SR 905 (Card Sound Road). The 6,686 acre (27.1 km2) refuge (located in Monroe County, Florida) opened during the year of 1980, under the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It was established in order to protect critical breeding and nesting habitat for the threatened American crocodile and other wildlife. This area also includes 650 acres (2.6 km2) of open water in and around the refuge. In addition to being one of only three breeding populations of the American crocodile, the refuge is home to many different habitat species including the tropical hardwood hammock, mangrove forest, and salt marsh. It is administered as part of the National Key Deer Refuge which is also located in southern Florida.
Read more about Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge: History, Activities At The Refuge, Problems, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words lake, national, wildlife and/or refuge:
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It appears to be a matter of national pride that the President is to have more mud, and blacker mud, and filthier mud in front of his door than any other man can afford.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“The world of crime ... is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)