Conservancy buys 578-acres in Blandford for cross-Mass Pike wildlife path
BLANDFORD — The Nature Conservancy bought 578 acres in Blandford earlier this week, furthering the goal of creating a way for wildlife to cross under the Mass Pike.
The fields and forests are filled only with the sounds of wildlife when visitors stick close to Chester Road in Blandford. But hike into the property, and the air fills with the rumble of traffic on the Massachusetts Turnpike, said Richard Cavanaugh, the land protection manager for The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts.
"You get a sense of how intrusive the Mass Pike is," he said. "And how loud and furious it is."
The property is near two culverts that stretch under all six lanes and the median. But they are only 4 feet across and fill with water.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation, state's Department of Conservation and Recreation and Department of Fish and Game, and the conservancy will monitor the culverts, find out how much water fills them, what wildlife uses them and what modifications are appropriate.
Think enlarging the tunnels. Or adding a dry shelf — a catwalk — so bobcats can move from one side of the pike to the other, Cavanaugh said.
The Nature Conservancy has a vision for the Appalachians as a continental-scale network of connected, resilient lands and waters — a 2,000-mile biodiversity superhighway enabling plants and animals to adapt to a changing climate.
But the human superhighway cuts east-west across it in Western Massachusetts.
"Any chance to mitigate that asphalt curtain is a helpful thing," Cavanaugh said.
The need for a safe wildlife passage became apparent on his first visit to the property. Cavanaugh said he hiked along the pike's shoulder and found first the rib cage and then the skull of a bear. The bear apparently got hit crossing the highway and dragged itself toward the woods, where it died.
With uplands, grasslands, young and old forests, the land is on the west side of Chester Road in Blandford near the Chester, Becket, and Otis town lines.
The heirs of Howard and Judith A. Terry sold the property to Conservancy Chester Road for $1.56 million on July 7, according to documents on file with the Hampden County Registry of Deeds.
Judith ran the family's Balsam Acres Christmas Tree Farm on part of this property until her passing in 2024, according to her obituary. Howard, a patent attorney and outdoorsman, died in 2014.
Cavanaugh said The Nature Conservancy several years ago completed an analysis of large privately owned tracts of land along the pike in the Hilltowns. Namely, properties that could connect existing publicly owned and preserved properties.
"This is one of the few sites that wasn't protected that showed up in that analysis," he said.
After Judith's death, the Terry family heirs expressed an interest in conserving the property. But the heirs wanted to sell quickly, more quickly than the state would have been able to move, Cavanaugh said.
So The Nature Conservancy bought the property, with the understanding that it will eventually sell the land to the DCR and MassWildlife.
Both state agencies have properties that already touch these 578 acres, with one example being Chester-Blandford State Forest.
In all, this purchase connects 40,000 acres of now contiguous, permanently protected land, Cavanaugh said. The protected property includes conserved watershed land owned by the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission.
Peebles Brook on the property feeds the Water and Sewer Commission 's Borden Brook and Cobble Mountain reservoirs, providing Springfield's drinking water.
The Sanderson, Cushman, Finley and Peebles brooks are all coldwater fisheries, associated with the famed Westfield River trout population.
There are also three vernal pools.
Eventually, the property will be opened up to hiking, hunting and other recreation. The state is considering what to do with the former Christmas tree farm, Cavanaugh said. It could be reopened, or the land might be restored to a more wild state.
The land is home to the vulnerable New England cottontail rabbit, which is threatened with habitat loss.
Stories by Jim Kinney
Read the original article on MassLive .
