A major conservation easement donation announced earlier this week will fulfill the Coastal Land Trust’s vision for preservation of key coastal woodlands along the Cape Fear River, according to the organization’s executive director.

On Tuesday, the Coastal Land Trust announced the gift of nearly 6,500 acres at Orton Plantation in Brunswick County in a deal inked last month.

The land – a mix of pine forest, cypress gum swamp and freshwater features – was given as a perpetual conservation easement by Louis Bacon, owner of Orton Plantation Holdings LLC.

“This 6,000-plus acres is additive in a lot of important ways to another 10,000 acres of land that have been protected,” said Camilla Herlevich, who heads the Coastal Land Trust. “That 10,000 is mostly privately owned and not open to the public, but it includes the 900-acre Brunswick Nature Park, which is operated by Brunswick County and is open to the public.”

Herlevich said the park, which is roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park, has a kayak landing area, picnic tables and trails for walking, mountain biking and horseback riding.

“The larger a contiguous tract is, the better habitat it provides for plants and animals, both in numbers and in diversity,” she said. “One 16,000-acre tract is better than 16 1,000-acre tracts. As an example, the combined conservation easements will provide habitat for neo-tropical migratory birds that breed in North America but migrate south for the winter to Central and South America. These birds are threatened because of habitat fragmentation, so the bigger the protected tract, the better.”

The Orton gift is the latest and largest of 19 project tracts – the smallest is 40 acres – that together make up the protected swath of land bounded by the Cape Fear River and representing a variety of coastal ecosystems, according to materials furnished by the Coastal Land Trust.

Herlevich said that Brunswick Nature Park users will have a “richer natural experience” thanks to the size of the conservation buffer surrounding it. In addition to migratory songbirds, she said, the area is likely to attract river otters, ibis, wild turkey and other game birds, the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, and even large mammals such as black bear.

“This is a vision that Coastal Land Trust has had for 20 years,” Herlevich said of achieving a conservation corridor of this size along the river. “It has taken 20 years to assemble the tracts, with help from the state of North Carolina through various grants from entities like the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and the N.C. Conservation Tax Credit, which has now expired.”
 
There’s benefit to everyone in the Cape Fear region from having a significant amount of land in this conservation easement, Herlevich said.

“We may not have a national park or forest, but we do have these amazing projects, and Orton’s 6,000 acres is going to help make our region a nationally significant ecotourism destination. Clean water and healthy forests help brand our region with its special coastal features.”