A Canaan Land Foundation Preserve · Gulf City, Florida
Honoring the past. Protecting the future.
Fifty-four acres of old Florida on the Little Manatee River, kept wild for the ospreys, herons, spoonbills, and cranes that have always called it home. And soon, a window for you to watch it all, live, without ever leaving yours.
Most preserves ask you to come quietly. This one asks you not to come at all. Rather than let foot traffic scare the birds from their nests, The Land Remembered is building a network of fifteen streaming cameras, carried over Starlink, so the whole world can watch this sanctuary live, twenty-four hours a day, while the land itself stays undisturbed.
Sanctuary Cameras
Fifteen cameras are planned across the preserve, several focused on active osprey nests with young in them right now. Feeds stream around the clock. No tickets, no trails, no disturbance.
Demonstration feed. Sanctuary cameras come online with the Starlink installation.
Rookery, Sandhill Meadow, Lighthouse Point, Spoonbill Flats & more
The Sanctuary
The Land Remembered sits just south of the Little Manatee River bridge, at the signalized intersection of US 41 and Gulf City Road. Its 5,100 feet of frontage face a river the State of Florida has designated an Outstanding Florida Waterway.
Inside the sanctuary stand 36 nests built for osprey, heron, roseate spoonbill, and sandhill cranes, several of them already occupied, with many other nesting habitats established throughout the property. Several osprey nests are active right now, with babies in them.
Native aquatic plants and freshwater fish fill three ponds across the preserve. A 400-square-foot octagon observation pavilion overlooks the largest of them, built for quiet viewing.
Included in the sanctuary is the adjoining outpost cabin on the Little Manatee River, with a lighthouse holding an 18th-century rotating fresnel lens.
The property is a significant paleontological site from the Ice Age, near the Leisey Shell Pit, recognized as one of the world's most abundant fossil locations.
The hammock in restoration: cabbage palms, live oaks, and a returning fern understory
The Sanctuary Map
The largest tract runs between the Tamiami Trail and the waters of the Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve: palm hammock and nesting uplands, where most of the sanctuary's 36 nests stand.
Between the highway and the river lie the three freshwater ponds, replanted along their banks with native aquatics and watched over by the 400-square-foot octagon observation pavilion.
On the riverbank at the strip's east end sit the outpost cabin and the lighthouse with its 18th-century rotating fresnel lens.
On the far bank, the sanctuary's island parcel gives the wading birds a rookery of their own, with 5,100 feet of river frontage wrapping the whole preserve.
The Story of the Land
Ferries and pirates, dredge pipes and fossils, a fish camp that held the line for a century. Every era left its mark here, and the land remembered all of it.
The property is a significant paleontological site from the Ice Age, sitting near the Leisey Shell Pit, recognized as one of the world's most abundant fossil locations.
This deep-water river harborage is reportedly the stronghold of one of Florida's most famous pirates, Ben Margoza, known as the "Pious Pirate."
From this site, the original Ruskin Ferry ran from the south shore to the north shore of the river. Until the 1900s, it was the only way to Tampa from the south part of Florida.
The historic Tamiami Trail was built across this property. Some of the original dredge pipes still rest along the edge of the Little Manatee River.
The prominent Ball Family operated a restaurant and fish camp here and kept this large tract in its natural state for over a century, an act of quiet preservation that made everything that follows possible.
Purchased by the Canaan Land Foundation, the property now begins its next century the way it spent its last one: wild, watched over, and full of wings.
The Work of Restoration
Nest platforms raised into the treetops. Floating nest islands lashed together from bamboo. Ponds cleared of duckweed one rake-load at a time, then replanted with Florida-grown native aquatics. One recent project alone took over 22 hours of hand labor. This is what it looks like to give 54 acres back to the wildlife.
Photographs and field notes from George Corbett, on the ground at the sanctuary.
The Stewards
Second-generation Floridians from Miami who grew up in the old Florida landscape of palmettos, aquatic grasses, wetlands, waterfowl, and upland wildlife. Their goal is to preserve this site for the future cultivation of Florida's natural wildlife.
George was a student of the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Florida's most influential preservationist, who helped spawn his love and passion for wildlife preservation. That passion became a lifetime of it: work with the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund on preservation efforts in Manatee Bay in Dade and Monroe Counties, work with the Army Corps of Engineers helping preserve the pelicans of the Port Orange Wildlife Sanctuary, and an appointment to one of Florida's Water Management Districts, where he served as President in the 1990s.
In the 1970s, George built an 8-acre marina in Key Largo using, for one of the first times anywhere, a dock-building method that let the mangroves remain along the entire 5,000 feet of shoreline. No county, state, or federal rule required it. He did it because the habitat mattered.
Nancy grew up in Homestead, where her father was comptroller of Bryant and Lounsbury Farms and was instrumental in upgrading living conditions for migrant workers in the Redlands in the 1950s. She is a direct descendant of one of the 150 original founding families of the Jamestown settlement. George descends from James J. "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, heavyweight champion of the world from 1892 to 1897.
Proud members & contributors
Support the Land
Every camera, nest platform, and acre of habitat is sustained by people who believe old Florida is worth keeping. Your gift helps bring the sanctuary's fifteen live cameras online and keeps this shoreline wild for the next hundred years.
“The Land Remembered sanctuary will be a further testament to God's bountiful and glorious creation.” George & Nancy Corbett