Displaying items by tag: shelby lyn sanders

Whorled rosinweed is among the many types of native grassland plants that emerged from a clearcut. The property in Meigs County near Georgetown is now protected in part by the Foothills Land Conservancy.  Shelby Lyn Sanders

FLC biologist makes an unexpected discovery in Georgetown, Tenn.

Shelby Lyn Sanders is director of natural resources for the Blount County-based Foothills Land Conservancy.

GEORGETOWN — What started as a simple search for a peaceful retreat turned into an extraordinary ecological discovery.

When Mr. Owen purchased his land near Georgetown, he was looking for a place to hunt, hike and escape city life. Little did he know he’d become the guardian of one of Tennessee’s rare prairie gems.

The property’s true identity emerged when the Foothills Land Conservancy’s director of natural resources (the author of this piece) spotted something remarkable during her first visit — prairie dock, a telltale sign of native grassland heritage. This wasn’t just any piece of land; it was a lost prairie awakening from decades of forest cover, less than a half mile from the historic Gunstocker Glade along Highway 58.

The timing was perfect. A 2022 clearcut had inadvertently liberated this sleeping prairie, allowing it to breathe and bloom for the first time in generations. By its second year, the land burst into life, revealing an astonishing diversity that had laid dormant for years.

Here’s an aerial view of the Owen property in Meigs County northeast of Chattanooga on the eastern Cumberland Plateau escarpment. Native prairie plants emerged from the site of a clearcut, yielding a surprisingly vital piece of prairie.  Shelby Lyn Sanders

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 recently completed a conservation easement on 100 acres near Cane Creek in Anderson County, Tenn.  Shelby Lyn Sanders/ Foothills Land Conservancy

Generations have crisscrossed the expansive pastures near Cane Creek in Anderson County