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Clapper Rail. Photo by Michael Todd

Amelia Island and Fort Clinch State Parks, Florida

One barrier island with two state parks. Two state parks bookend the northern-most barrier island on Florida’s Atlantic seashore. This coastal area welcomes hundreds of neotropical species during spring and fall migrations, and provides the home address to approximately 100 species year-round. Amelia Island State Park: At the southern tip of this sea island (named

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A piping plover stands among beach vegetation.

Perdido Key State Park, Florida

Shore-to-shore Birding. The coastal barrier islands of this expansive seashore region—the Florida panhandle—sit at the confluence of two flyways: the Atlantic and the Mississippi. The Gulf Island National Seashore contains an “extremely high diversity of [bird] species, [as a] result of its size, location, and diversity of habitats,” according to Audubon. That’s great news for

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Whooping Cranes by Geoff Gallice / Wikimedia.

Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, Florida

No beaches required. In the late 1770s, renowned naturalist William Bartram recorded his awe-struck impressions of this biologically and geologically significant area in the northern center of the Florida peninsula, calling it the “great Alachua Savannah.” As late as the 1880s, this prairie was a lake deep enough for steamboat passage. In the 1970s it

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