#MIDDLEBURY
Send in your guess identifying the August “Can You Guess The Location?” mystery Middlebury Land Trust property. (Alice Hallaran photo)
By JANINE SULLIVAN-WILEY
The August mystery location is shown in the photo with this article. It should be familiar to many, but you can use the Middlebury Land Trust (MLT) website, www.middleburylandtrust.org, to help you figure out where it is. Email your best guess for the location to mbisubmit@gmail.com, and please put “Guess the location” in the subject line. Previous Spotlight articles are at www.bee-news.com and on the Bee’s Facebook page. In September, we will name the correct email respondents for August; the first respondent is the winner.
No one guessed the July mystery location. That picture showed the start of the trails at the entrance to the Flanders Nature Center Whittemore Sanctuary, which is on Route 64 not far from the Middlebury border with Woodbury. Why, you may ask, is a Flanders property in a series about Middlebury Land Trust properties?
It’s because the MLT holds a conservation easement for the Whittemore Sanctuary. This means it is responsible for oversight, but another land trust (Flanders) owns the property. This arrangement gets to the core of what a land trust is and what it does. In the original acquisition back in 1999, funded by a large state grant and generous private donations, it was agreed another land trust would hold the conservation easement.
The MLT became the designated holder of that easement and assumed the responsibility of keeping an eye on the property and checking for any failure to maintain all of it in the condition spelled out in the original agreement. Watching over the land is a big part of what any land trust has to do. Land trusts don’t just hold the land that is being preserved. A land trust’s conservation easement can be thought of like the emergency brake on a car – a backup in case the primary brakes fail.
That helps explain why there are different types of easements. All mean that there are things that can – or cannot – be done on or with the property. For example, an agricultural easement means that the land or space has to be maintained for agricultural use, whether that is farming, growing grass for haying or having fields for grazing. The actual easements are drafted by lawyers and are quite technical, but that is the essence.
Back to the Whittemore Sanctuary. Its roughly 690 acres offer multiple marked trails. Within its boundaries are a bog and an edge of Lake Quassapaug. There are several well-marked trails to follow; they are the favorite hiking spot for our friends and their dogs. You can choose a long hike (the white trail is a 3.75-mile loop) or short (the blue trail).
The trails can be quite wet in the spring but are drier this time of year. Maps are available at the entrance. Hikers need to pay attention to the many roots and rocks on parts of the trails. The sanctuary has the usual animal life for this part of Connecticut. One runner came upon a black bear in mid July.
Plant lovers won’t want to miss the bog, which is home to a number of unique plants that thrive in its acid waters. In addition to red maples, plants in the heath family, blueberries, cranberries and sheep laurel make up the base of the mat islands in the bog and have special adaptations that allow them to live there.
The bog contains three types of carnivorous plants that eat insects as their source of protein and therefore thrive there. Pitcher plants and sundews live at the edge of the mat communities, and bladderwort lives in the open water. They are all abundant in the bog but a challenge to see. A good set of binoculars helps! Easier to see are water lilies, common arrowroot and pipe wort when they’re in bloom in the open water sections.
This preserve is a “don’t miss”!
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