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Fires restore native grasses, wildlife By SUE WATSON
Staff Writer  | Photo by Sue Watson
Conservation minded
Tom and Jane Heineke rest under a shade tree on their property at Hudsonville. In the background is an old tenant house. |
Tom
and Jane Heineke and lots of their neighbors recently took off several
hundred acres of grass and brush in a controlled burn. It is designed
to restore native grass habitats to the Coldwater River headwaters near
Hudsonville. Nine landowners, working in
partnership with Strawberry Plains Audubon under a Toyota TogetherGreen
grant, are building a community of conservationists in the area. They
will re-seed with indigenous grasses and wildflowers that thrive in the
area and also support indigenous wildlife like quail. “Property
owners are doing it all together; the controlled burn was all planned
out,” said Bubba Hubbard, executive director of Strawberry Plains
Audubon. He said the burn over will remove dead
Bermuda grass that was killed by herbicides last fall. The Bermuda was
originally planted for cattle farming but produces a thatch too thick
for young quail chicks to get under to forage for bugs and worms. In other words, the Bermuda is not useful to quail and other grassland wildlife species. Two
one-year grants and an expected third one are helping with the
partnership, which involves about 500 acres of land that will be
re-planted in native grass species that support native species of
birds, some threatened by traditional agricultural methods that brought
Bermuda to the area. The Bermuda was used to support cattle farming
which is on the decline on some of the farms, as newcomers find the
area an attractive place to live and practice conservation. The
practices are hoped to support quail populations and hunting, as well
as keep silt and erosion from contaminating the headwaters of the
Coldwater River. The Heinekes also support
Strawberry Plains, Hubbard said. The interest in conservation is really
unusual in the Hudsonville area, he said. “And we appreciate each other for that,” Hubbard said. “The Coldwater River Watershed Initiative is definitely a part of this.” Tom
Heineke, a botanist trained at the Southern Illinois University in
Carbondale, Ill., and his wife Jane moved to Hudsonville in 2005. They
had operated a private business with the City of Memphis, Tenn., as one
of their customers. Heineke & Associates Inc. was hired to identify
all the plant species in Overton Park, one of the most significant
parks in Memphis. Heineke sold his company after 16 years, and prior to that, worked 10 years with the U.S. Corps of Engineers in Memphis. Participating in the back-to-nature movement in Hudsonville is just natural for them. “Jane
and I were looking for a property within 100 miles of Memphis for four
or five years and we saw a little classified ad for this property in
the Commercial Appeal,” he said. “We said, ‘What the heck. We’ll look
at it.’ ” Their soon-to-be 289-acre spread had a
termite-riddled old farm house on it. They decided not to try to
restore it and bought the land in 2003 and designed their own home. The
next year the Heinekes visited Strawberry Plains Audubon Center’s
wildflower sale where they met a future neighbor and friend of nature,
Suzanne Langley. But Kristin Lamberson,
interpretive gardens specialist at Strawberry Plains, seemed to be the
mastermind behind the whole initiative, Heineke said. “Kristin
was aware we were here and Suzanne came to work for Strawberry Plains
and was talked into buying some of the land,” he said. Chad
Pope, ecologist at Strawberry Plains Audubon, also bought property
adjacent to the Heinekes. Shannon and Amanda McGee bought about 100
acres down the road adjacent to Langley property. Mike Boone and his
wife, Wanda Hairston, bought his family’s home on Hudsonville Road. “And Ronnie and Harriett Caldwell preceded all of us,” Heineke said. “It was one person after the other.” In
fact, the entire tract of land now owned by the Heinekes and Caldwells
was in the hands of Dick Sanders. It was Ronnie Caldwell who talked him
into selling some of the property. “Then we saw the ad in the paper,” he said. There’s one common thread which binds the little community together. “We
all share a really strong affinity for restoring the land and
protecting the land and admiring what was here and what is here,”
Heineke said. The Toyota grant includes repairing
some erosional features on the lands and the property owners share
ideas, equipment and labor, he said. “We help
each other with breaking gardens and all sorts of things,” he said. “I
always, in the back of my mind, wanted something like this, but I never
expected it to happen. I love the quality of the ecology and the
rolling hills. It still boggles my mind, all these people coming
together.” Ronnie and Harriett Caldwell moved to
Hudsonville from Mt. Pleasant nine years ago to enlarge their holdings
to range and train their Paso Fino horses. They bought the land from
Dick Sanders, who they knew from Slayden Baptist Church. “Suzanne
and others started buying and moving and it has evolved into quite a
‘green-minded’ community,” he said. “Call it fate or the proximity to
the Coldwater River, Audubon, the national forest or whatever, it is a
wonderful ‘raw’ - one of the most beautiful places in Mississippi. Our
neighbors, the Hollands, and others already had in place the
beginnings. What we have done is simply gotten in touch with each other
and communicated our desire to have an environmentally clean community.” Strawberry Plains has been the source of information and inspiration for the partnership. “It’s
enormous how it helps to have that facility there,” Heineke said,
“because all those people are like-minded, very helpful and I can’t say
enough good things about them. “Kristin Lamberson had land out there and she was the center or reason or driving force holding it together here.” Since
being on the land, Heineke said he is listing all the plant species he
sees in the Hudsonville area and records what he encounters, including
mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians, as well as plants. He works with Mississippi State University occasionally since he found four different threatened plant species. Heineke
took a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in New Orleans after
graduating with a PhD, made friends working with the U.S. Corps of
Engineers in Vicksburg, then took a job with the Corps in Memphis. “That’s how I got here,” he said. “Jane is an English education teacher and librarian and worked 16 years with my company.” Lamberson
was singled out for recognition by Audubon for her work with the
TogetherGreen project. In November 2009, Lamberson was awarded a
national fellowship to continue to provide leadership for those
interested in environmental projects. She was one of 40 people
nationwide chosen as a 2009 TogetherGreen Fellow last year. The
Fellowship provides $10,000 towards a community-focused project to
engage a group of residents in conserving land, water, and energy to
improve environmental health. The award will be used to enlarge an
interpretive garden already in place at Strawberry Plains. Lamberson
said her role in the TogetherGreen project was to find other parties
who would be interested in protecting the Coldwater River Watershed and
putting in conservation practices to support restoration of wildlife,
particularly bird populations. “The partnerships involved getting people together to buy land who are like-minded,” she said. At
the Audubon Center native plants, particularly nectar-producing
species, have been established on the grounds to support the annual
ruby-throated hummingbird migration and to attract and sustain
butterflies. Lamberson has landscaped the grounds at the center for
that purpose and also maintains a plant nursery where native species
are propagated for sale to visitors. Caldwell,
who works for the City of Bartlett, loves this country and wants to
protect it from “flight from the city” type dwellers and was looking
for peace and quiet. Pope, with Strawberry
Plains eight years and a product of Tupelo, has purchased 25 acres and
partners in the TogetherGreen program. He helps to get landowners’ work
done because of his expertise in ecology. “We do burns across property lines looking at habitats - grassland complexes go across multiple properties,” he said. In
the immediate area of Hudsonville about 700 acres are in the
TogetherGreen project. Pope also works with others in the Coldwater
River Watershed project. All totaled, there are about 3,000 acres of
private land and about 2,000 acres that includes Strawberry Plains in
the TogetherGreen and Coldwater River Watershed project, he said. “I
don’t know how to explain it,” Pope said of the success of the
Hudsonville effort. “It started with a couple of conservation-minded
people moving to the area, then others started moving here who are
interested in conservation of wildlife. We’ve been fortunate at Audubon
to assist landowners financially.” Some
conservation practices include putting riparian buffers to stop erosion
near ditches, creeks and streams, building early successional
grasslands and restoring old pasture lands by planting native species
of grasses and wildflowers, Pope said.  | Controlled burn
John Gruchy, with Mississippi Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, assists with the controlled burn. |
“With
the burns, we’ve been fortunate to have the Mississippi Department of
Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks assisting us with burns and with
landowner consultations,” he said. Although quail
serves as the posterchild for the species to be expanded, Pope said
from an Audubon perspective, other grassland species of birds are hoped
to come back if enough acreage is put together. “Statewide they have shown that populations do respond when we repair habitats,” he said.
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