Naturalists Deal to Save Isles for Wildlife

The Nature Conservancy has been busy capturing islands from sea to shining sea to provide habitats for rare, threatened and endangered creatures.

In the process, it has led its negotiators into some strange and complicated deals.

For example: Shelter Island off the tip of New York’s Long Island, 6,000 bucolic acres just two hours by car from the towers of New York City.

A third of it was the Mashomack Hunt Club, owned by the Girard family, which felt very strongly about keeping it a wildlife preserve.

It was held by a family-owned realty company that also held other family properties.

The family wanted to make a substantial gift of land, but it also wanted to realize some cash from the holdings that included nine brownstones near Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, warehouse property in Miami, and a number of oil and gas wells.

What to do?

Conservancy experts worked out an elaborate deal. The family sold the realty company to the conservancy for less than the market value, reaping a charity tax deduction. The conservancy then sold off the brownstones, the gas and oil wells and the warehouses and raised the rest of the $12 million it owed the family for the realty company.

Today, the Mashomack Preserve, on the Atlantic flyway, is home for flocks of migratory birds, including the elusive osprey.

Matagordo Island is tiny by comparison. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desperately wanted the last parcel to go with the rest it managed in partnership with the Texas wildlife service.

The island’s inhabitants include about 140 whooping cranes, millions of ducks and other waterfowl.

The conservancy again stepped in and bought the land, transferring it to the wildlife service as federal funds became available.

Had they waited, the land would have fallen to the 40 or so heirs of the man who owned it, and consensus is difficult under those circumstances. He died of a heart attack only months after the deal was made.

Sometimes a gift becomes an ecological headache.

Santa Cruz Island is one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Over the years the owner gave most of the 60,000 acres to the Nature Conservancy.

A century and a half ago, sheep were introduced to what was largely a cattle ranch. The sheep ran wild, eventually numbering up to 40,000. The conservancy brought in Navajo shepherds to round them up. It didn’t work.

They went to the association of sheep ranchers, who were of no help and were plainly disturbed lest that much mutton be dumped on the market all at once.

Finally and regrettably, fencing off a square mile at a time, the sheep were killed.

Sheep, as any reader of Westerns will tell you, eat the grass down to the roots. When the conservancy got the land, the island was a dead brown. Today, all but 10,000 privately held acres in the south are green, and home to specific island species such as the Santa Cruz kit fox, island jay and others.