New Hampshire: 1000 acres of Ragged Mtn. protected
A nearly 1,000-acre plot of land on Ragged Mountain in Hill will be
protected from development under an agreement between the landowner
and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. The
society recently purchased a conservation easement for 960 acres of
the March Pond Forest, paid for primarily with grant money from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Brian Hotz, the
society’s director of land protection.
The easement, which the society
paid for with $235,000 in grant money and $40,000 from donors,
connects to a much broader section of land that conservationists are
working to protect, Hotz said. And several of its streams feed into
Smith River, which the society has targeted as an important tributary
of the Merrimack River and suitable for restoring the Atlantic salmon
population. A conservation easement appeals to many landowners, Hotz
said, because “it’s a process for really conserving the land’s values,
or attributes, but still retaining ownership of the property.” Though
the landowner retains ownership, he turns over the chance to develop
it further, which explains the monetary value of the easement. But
easements are individualized, Hotz said, and in this case, the owner,
who sold the land at a below-market price, kept the rights to develop
a portion of it – two sections of about 3 acres eash, Hotz said. Land
has been turned over to conservation easements at a “pretty steady
pace” in recent years, Hotz said. “I think the difference is there
aren’t really that many large parcels left. So having properties that
are 1,000 acres,” he said, is significant. Besides preserving streams
involved with the project to restore Atlantic salmon, the easement
covers an area that “provides good habitat” for a number of species,
Hotz said, including bears, bobcats and songbirds “that need that
interior forest land that isn’t fragmented.”
March Pond, which is
about nine acres in size and sits near the middle of the area, has
geese, ducks and otters, Hotz said. The purchase ties into what the
society calls the Quabbin-to-Cardigan Initiative, an effort by about
20 agencies to conserve a large path of land that stretches from the
Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts to Mount Cardigan in New Hampshire.
That initiative, which Hotz said began around 2002, was partly a
reaction to population growth, especially regarding immigration from
Massachusetts to the southern part of New Hampshire, said Joyce El
Kouarti, the society’s communications director. As people noticed
farms disappearing in favor of subdivisions, they realized “it was
nice to have that farm there; it was nice to have those woods there,”
she said. “It was an opportunity, I think, for the conservation
community to build on that – yes, yes, you’re noticing what we have .
. . and don’t just assume it’s always going to be there.”
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081219/NEWS01/812190333/1043/NEWS01
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