Displaying items by tag: shelby lyn sanders
‘Cute little falcons’ fly free in Wildwood
Katheryn Albrecht holds a juvenile American kestrel just prior to releasing it into the Wildwood area of Blount County as part of the Farmland Raptor Project. Thomas Fraseer/Hellbender Press
Farmland Raptor Project takes wing to expand raptor populations on private properties
WILDWOOD — She felt the bird in her hand in her heart as the kestrel strained toward freedom.
Elise Eustace, communications director for Foothills Land Conservancy, blessed the bird and let it go, free to make a home somewhere on the 300-acre Andy Harris Farm or elsewhere in the Wildwood area of Blount County. “I’ve never gotten to do something like this,” she said. “So exciting.”
Two other juvenile kestrels joined their kin on the warm summer afternoon, lighting into nearby oaks and atop a telephone line above the red and yellow pollinator gardens and dry pasture and cornfield and copses that punctuate the property in the shadow of smoky knobs that rise gradually to the Smokies crest beyond the blue-green hollows of the Little River watershed. Resident sparrows, bluebirds and kingbirds voiced displeasure at the new arrivals.
Foothills Land Conservancy commits more land to memory
Foothills Land Conservancy recently completed a conservation easement on 100 acres near Cane Creek in Anderson County, Tenn. Shelby Lyn Sanders/ Foothills Land Conservancy