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Danner Family Preserve
28 acres
Indian Hill Road, Jefferson Valley
Park along the road near the preserve entrance
Westchester Land Trust's newest public preserve gives hikers a chance
to wander along a trail that loops through a habitat that seems at
first to be not much to look at but which turns out to be relatively
uncommon and ideal for locally-dwindling bird species.
The 28-acre
Danner Family Preserve spans the Yorktown-Putnam Valley town line and
the border of Westchester and Putnam counties. More than half the
preserve consists of old field habitat, thick with grey dogwood other
successional shrubs.
It's a habitat that has become rare as our
area's woods have grown older, and the result is that birds that rely
on it, including indigo bunting, prairie warbler and rufous-sided
towhee, have also become rarer.
An old farm that is now overgrown,
the property features a wide farm road that loops from the preserve
entrance, on Indian Hill Road, to the edge of the woods at the crest of
the hill, and back. It is the eighth Westchester Land Trust preserve
with trails that are open to the public.
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| The Danner Preserve, shown in red, spans the Yorktown-Putnan Valley border. |
Eugene and Josephine
Danner, who had owned the land for several decades, donated the
property to Westchester Land Trust in late 2007, after donating a
conservation easement on it to the Yorktown Land Trust and the Putnam
County Land Trust. They were inspired by Donald J. Trump's donation of
436 acres for the state park now named after him (the state park is in
two sections, one of which is across the road).
The Danner preserve
is probably the only one of the 27 properties Westchester Land Trust
owns that contains no wetlands. Because of that, and because it also
has few steep slopes, the potential for development was high.
Here's what Westchester Land Trust's land preservation coordinator,
Damon Oscarson, said about the property in his assessment of it to our
Board of Directors:
"This Danner property has very significant
conservation values and has important wildlife habitat value. ... It
has a mix of young to moderate aged deciduous forest, old
post-agricultural fields, and numerous old stone walls.
"The
fields are presently thick shrubs, which is ideal habitat for declining
shrub-dependent bird species. It creates a unique opportunity to manage
for field and shrubland species ...."
The Danner Family Preserve is
the third preserve we own in Yorktown - the Hunter Brook Preserve (45
acres) and the Hemlock Brook Preserve (14 acres) are the others.