"Where Nature Takes Flight, Right in Your Backyard." That's the line the Town chose when it rolled out its new guided birding series this year, and it undersells what's actually going on.
Most people who live on the Ranches side of Griffin Road have already made peace with the swallow-tailed kites circling overhead in spring, the herons standing in the drainage canals at dusk, the sense that this town backs up against something wilder than the rest of Broward. That's the ambient version of the story, the one you absorb without thinking about it. What changed this year is that the Town started treating it as something you can actually do, on a schedule, with a guide, a checklist, and an app.
The guide is Bob Hartmann. He's also the Vice Mayor.
The Tours Are Real, and They're Not Monthly
The program is called Wings Over the Ranches, and it's built around scheduled walks through the town's own park system rather than a single trail or preserve. Each tour opens with a short orientation and safety briefing, then moves into a guided walk through what the Town calls its birding hotspots. Participants get a printed checklist on the spot, and the Town points people toward Merlin and eBird, the two apps most serious birders already use to log and identify sightings, so the list doesn't have to end when the tour does.
That's a meaningfully different structure than the Town's other recurring event, the Monthly Southwest Ranches Food Festival, which shows up like clockwork in the first week of nearly every month. The birding tours don't. The two dates on record for 2026 are March 14 and August 15, both running from 8:00 to 10:30 in the morning. Five months apart is not a monthly rhythm. It reads more like a program timed to migration windows than one built for routine attendance, which means the smart move for a resident is to watch the Town's events calendar rather than assume there's always another one next month.
The Guide Is Your Neighbor, Not a Consultant
Hartmann isn't an outside expert brought in for a season. He and his wife Nancy have lived in Southwest Ranches for more than 30 years, and the property they settled on in 1988 was chosen in part to support the orchid and landscape nursery they were running at the time. He's served on the Town Council since 2018, in both council member and vice mayor roles, and his public description of the town's appeal is blunt:
"If any individual or family wants this rural lifestyle, South Florida has only one choice: Southwest Ranches."
That's not marketing copy written by a tourism board. It's the same person leading you through the sawgrass on a Saturday morning telling you why he's still here three decades later. The Town's own description of him as a seasoned Audubon guide with an encyclopedic knowledge of bird behavior lines up with a résumé that includes decades of hands-on land use in this exact area, which is a different kind of credibility than a guest speaker flown in for one event.
The Parks Weren't Built for This
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the Town's own promotional language, and it's the reason Southwest Ranches has a rookery and a migratory corridor worth touring in the first place.
Frontier Trails, one of the parks now featured on the birding circuit, is a 30-acre parcel that sits inside a neighboring city rather than inside Southwest Ranches proper. The Town bought it not because it wanted a nature preserve, but because the land was originally platted for one dwelling unit per acre, and the risk of higher-density development next door pushed the Town to purchase it outright to lock in that lower density. Only after the purchase did residents make clear they wanted open space and natural enhancement rather than any residential use at all. Grants from the Florida Communities Trust and Broward County's Open Space program followed, and the site is now being developed around wetlands, native plantings meant to foster a rookery, and preservation of an existing archaeological site.
In other words, the bird habitat exists because of a zoning fight, not a conservation plan. The Town wasn't trying to build a birdwatching destination. It was trying to stop a neighbor from building too densely, and the byproduct is now one of the stops on a guided nature tour.
Rolling Oaks Passive Park tells a similar story, just less adversarial. Its 44.8 acres include restored wetlands, a butterfly garden, a fitness trail, and the Barn, a renovated community facility available for rental. The Town has also announced plans for a public art piece carved from a decades-old live oak on the property that was struck by lightning in 2023, which is the kind of detail that only shows up if you've actually walked the site rather than read about it secondhand.
Where to Actually Go
The Town's park system covers more than 150 acres linked by upwards of 25 miles of right-of-way trails, but the birding tours narrow that down to a handful of specific stops worth knowing by name:
- Rolling Oaks Passive Park – restored wetlands, a butterfly garden, and the repurposed Barn, sitting on nearly 45 acres in the heart of town
- Frontier Trails – the 30-acre parcel with a planned rookery and an active archaeological preservation component
- Country Estates Fishing Hole – 16 acres combining a nature-themed playground with pedestrian, equestrian, and nature trails
- Sunshine Ranches Equestrian Park – the first park the Town developed, kept open to the public with an equestrian focus that overlaps with the birding route
Because the parks sit at the eastern edge of the Everglades, they function as a genuine seasonal corridor rather than a static backdrop. The Town's own materials point to swallow-tailed kites gliding with their forked tails, great egrets and blue herons wading through the sawgrass, and eagles, warblers, and hawks passing through depending on the time of year. What you see in March will not be what you see in August, which is part of why the Town scheduled two tours five months apart instead of repeating the same walk every few weeks.
Between the Scheduled Tours
You don't need to wait for the next official date to use what the program set up. The Merlin and eBird recommendations work year-round, and the Town has built a digital gallery where residents can view recent sightings and submit their own using the hashtag #WingsOverTheRanches, with a chance that photos get featured on the Town's site or in future newsletters. That turns the tour from a one-time event into an ongoing record, one a resident can add to on an ordinary Tuesday morning without waiting for the calendar to line up.
The bigger point is one most people driving past these parks on the way to Griffin Road have never had reason to consider. The reason there's this much to see here isn't luck, and it isn't a nature preserve the Town set out to build. It's a byproduct of how a town that fought to stay rural actually stayed rural, acre by contested acre, sometimes over a zoning dispute with a neighbor rather than a grand plan. That habit of buying land to control what happens on it is the same habit that shapes every large parcel and every horse property this team helps residents value and sell.
If you're weighing what a piece of Southwest Ranches acreage can actually support, from working pasture to a quiet wetland corner of your own, Tommy Crivello Group spends as much time reading land as reading listings. Request a Private Valuation when you're ready to find out what your acreage is really worth.
