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Great Dismal Swamp:
Bringing Business to the Cause
Union Camp Corporation's 1973 donation to the Conservancy of more than 49,000 acres in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia awakened the corporate world to the crucial role it could play in land conservation. "Union Camp's gift represented the beginning of a new partnership between the business community and the American conservation movement," says Patrick Noonan, a former Conservancy president and now chairman of The Conservation Fund. "No longer were corporations seen as the enemy of environmentalists, but rather, for the first time, as full partners in our quest to protect the best of our nation's natural heritage."

At a press conference announcing the donation and the land's transfer to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to create a new refuge, Noonan was asked if the Conservancy was accepting tainted money. Scarcely missing a beat, Noonan gave a now-legendary response: "It may be tainted, but 't'ain't' enough."

Trois Pitons: An International First
The Conservancy's first international project was born in 1974 when international conservationist John D. Archbold donated 950 acres of pristine tropical rain forest on the Caribbean island of Dominica. In 1983 the Conservancy gave the property-acclaimed for its lush flora-to Dominica to add to its 16,000-acre Trois Pitons National Park.

Nags Head Woods
© Ray Culter/TNC

Nags Head Woods: Designed by Science
In 1974, Robert E. Jenkins, then the Conservancy's vice president for science, conceived a powerful system for identifying the best natural lands on the basis of their rare species and communities of species. Eventually implemented in all 50 states and 17 countries, these natural heritage inventories ultimately led to the most complete data base of biota in the world.

One of the first of these heritage programs flagged North Carolina's Nags Head Woods, a maritime forest lodged among the back barrier dunes of the Outer Banks. According to Jenkins, "Nags Head Woods was the initial project where the Conservancy employed every step of the biodiversity conservation planning process, from the site's identification to its preserve design." First, the occurrence, location and abundance of the land's imperiled species were documented. These data were then compared with property ownership patterns, boundary needs, degrees and types of protection required.

"For systematic, science-driven conservation," says Jenkins, "the creation of Nags Head Woods Preserve exceeded anything else I ever saw at the Conservancy of similar scale and importance. And last, it's such a marvelous place. You have a visceral sense from the moment you enter the area that says, 'We have to save this.' "

Blackfoot River Corridor: Easing into Easements
Conservation easements are a powerful protection tool that allows the Conservancy to acquire selectively only those rights necessary to protect the natural features of the land while allowing the property owner to retain title.

In the early 1970s, several local landowners along the Blackfoot River called on the Conservancy to build the foundation of what would become Montana's enabling legislation for conservation easements. The law was passed in 1975, and the next year the Conservancy accepted a gift of the state's first easement along the Blackfoot: 1,800 acres from Edna Brunner. Twenty-six years later, the Conservancy holds 12,763 acres in conservation easements here, and it also has assisted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in securing 1,012 acres in easements.

"The Nature Conservancy was the original conservation organization that stepped up to the plate with private landowners," says Land Lindbergh, a property owner along the Blackfoot. "No other organization in the state was even talking about conservation easements [in the early 1970s]."

Silver Creek: The Power of Perseverance
Legendary for its fly-fishing, Silver Creek Preserve is one of the most successful stream conservation efforts undertaken by a private organization in the United States. In 1976 the Conservancy purchased 479 acres and 4 miles of Silver Creek from the Sun Valley Company, which had maintained the Idaho land as a hunting and fishing retreat. A quarter of a century later, the Conservancy has protected more than 9,000 acres here: 882 edging the stream that are owned by the organization and an additional 8,400 covered by conservation easements. The preserve now secures 30 miles of Silver Creek. Ernest Hemingway's son, Jack, spoke of a morning at the creek in a 1976 Nature Conservancy News article: "There are red-winged blackbirds calling in the cattail marshes, geese clamoring for nesting sites... bees gathering pollen in the wildflowers, trout rising to the early hatches, all mixed with the sound of the stream-the fishing regulars call it Silver Creek music!"

Santa Cruz Island: Making a California Statement
Little known in California in 1978, the Conservancy made its presence felt in a big way when it purchased a conservation easement and eventual ownership of 90 percent of Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the state's Channel Islands. (The remaining tenth became part of the Channel Islands National Park in 1997.) Santa Cruz covers nearly 100 square miles and boasts two mountain ranges, sweeping grasslands, numerous perennial streams, unspoiled shorelines and 11 plant and animals species that occur nowhere else in the world. In what may be the Conservancy's earliest habitat restoration effort, the organization and its partners set about rejuvenating the island's natural vegetation, long overgrazed by sheep. Today Santa Cruz's native species are on the way to recovery.

Dolly Sods: Partnering with the Feds
Assisting public agencies in securing lands for refuges and parks is one of the Conservancy's top protection techniques and has spelled protection for millions of acres across the country. In one of its earliest and more interesting government cooperative projects, the Conservancy purchased 15,617 acres of coal below Dolly Sods in West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest and sold it to the U.S. Forest Service. The Forest Service already owned the surface acreage there; acquisition of the coal below enabled 10,215 acres of Dolly Sods to be designated as a Wilderness Area. To date, the Conservancy has protected 22,000 acres at Dolly Sods, one of the largest roadless areas in the Central Appalachian Forest Ecoregion and a major migratory pathway for neotropical songbirds and raptors.

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