Green Mountain Conservancy Land Conservation Fund

Exciting things are happening at GMC.  We have three land conservation projects in process and expect to increase that number in the coming months.  An all volunteer organization, board members are working hard to insure that every cent we raise goes directly toward the purchase and protection of critical forest blocks.

#1. The Conservancy has been awarded a $60,000 grant toward the $80,000 purchse of 30 acres of forest contiguous to GMC's 913 acre Deer Run Nature Preserve.  This glorious woodland is host to numerous iconic shagbark hickory trees that provide maternal nesting sites to the northern long-eared bat, a parklike sedge understory, numerous lichens and mosses, rocky outcrops, cozy glens and deep ravines, and an intermittent stream that sometimes flows north to a beaver wetland and sometimes south to the Connecticut River.

#2.  An historic 115 acre farm, settled in the 1700's, abandoned in the 1900's and left to grow to mature forest in Dummerston, VT, has been donated to the Conservancy.  A woodland walk takes hikers past ancient stonewalls, and the cellar holes that were once overlain by various farm buildings.  Incredible ancient white oaks, that once grew in patures to provide shade for farm animals, are now protected by the mature forest that surrounds them.  

#3.  GMC is in the process of purchasing and conserving with the Vermont River Conservancy the first of many parcels of land known as the Old Oaks Headwaters Preserve.  It is hoped that this preserve will eventually encompass over 1,000 acres of forest, whose protection is critical to the protection of the  headwaters of  the West, Rock and Green rivers, land that is home to all kinds of wildlife including beaver, bear and porcupine, and that is part of the east-west wildlife corridor from the Green Mountains to the CT River. 

Links:

• Green Mountain Conservancy