None The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming Press Releases Search All Press Releases Kerry Brophy-Lloyd phone: 307-335-2135 email: kbrophy@tnc.org

The Nature Conservancy Celebrates Nine Years in Sheridan County

SHERIDAN, WY— Monday, September 10, 2007—This month, The Nature Conservancy marks its ninth anniversary of conservation in Sheridan County. Over the years, the organization’s outcomes in this part of Wyoming have come to resemble a giant quilt, stitched together over time with careful hands.

Sally Morton, The Nature Conservancy’s northeast Wyoming program director based in Sheridan, has helped create a vast patchwork of conservation in this region. The thread: a dedicated group of family ranchers committed to conservation.

Today, close to 52,000 acres in Sheridan County have been protected by voluntary conservation easements. Many of these easements are contiguous, connecting private lands in a way that restricts fragmentation from expanding residential development and providing critical, unbroken wildlife corridors.

“Filling in easements to create a bigger whole has been gratifying,” says Morton, who has lived in Sheridan since the 1970s. The key: collaboration. In two separate instances, five landowners came together to create 8,953 and 9,400 contiguous acres of easement-protected lands.

Going forward, says Morton, will take more collaboration—with landowners and land trusts like the Wyoming Stock Growers Agricultural Land Trust and the new Sheridan Community Land Trust. “As an organization, The Nature Conservancy can’t go it alone,” Morton says. “It’s critical that we work with others, indeed, we would not have achieved conservation on such a large scale here if it weren’t for collaborative partnerships.”

The Bighorn Foothills are where the Northern Great Plains collide with the Rocky Mountains. In this transition zone between mixed-grass prairie and ponderosa-pine forest, mountain run-off seeps down wooded draws to sustain plants and animals found only in this unique ecosystem. The area is a high priority for The Nature Conservancy, identified by scientists as a critical area to conserve.

As Morton enters her tenth year working in this unique landscape, there’s some comfort. “I love seeing the colors change here in the fall, and hearing the music of elk bugling and geese on the fly,” she says. “It’s wonderful to know it will always be like this; we have the greatest landowners whose enthusiasm and desire to maintain and conserve what is here is extremely heartening.”

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.