The Conservation History of the Estabrook Woods
The 1960s vision of Ernst Mayr and Thomas Flint created a new ecology study area (the Concord Field Station) in Estabrook Woods for Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and the area's biological community. [Photo by Jamie Christian.
Click for larger.] Harvard President Rudenstine capped 30 years of citizens' hard work when in 1997 he dedicated Harvard's part (700 acres) of Estabrook Woods for conservation [the ceremony's remarks are here]. The idea for a ecological study area in the seven-hundred-acre core of
Estabrook Country took shape in the early 1960s under the guidance of
Harvard Professor Ernst Mayr (bio.).
Four Concord residents (MCZ Curator Barbara Lawrence, David Emerson, Thomas Flint, and Lawrence "Monk" Terry (then the retiring headmaster of the adjacent Middlesex School) led the campaign for Estabrook protection. Ernst Mayr says that Thomas Flint was particularly important: as the descendent of a Concord first settler who had owned land in Estabrook in 1653, Mr. Flint was active in the new Concord Land Conservation Trust and took the leadership in reassuring the town and each affected landowner. Concord had been besieged with subdivision plans and in the early 1960s it was feared that large tracts in the Estabrook country would be put on the market. Other changes threatened: in the 1960s, the state Department of Public Works held a public hearing in town at which it proposed to re-route Route 2 through the Great Meadows and the Estabrook Woods (passing within a few yards north of Middlesex School). So there were many reasons why the town and Estabrook's neighbors would support its preservation. With the assistance of the Nature Conservancy, the sponsoring committee, co-chaired by Messrs. Flint and Terry, raised $495,000 to enable Harvard to acquire close to 700 acres as the center of a biological study area. The Middlesex School trustees loaned money for the acquisition of options. Many in the community clearly had the understanding that Middlesex School's land east of Bateman's Pond was to be an integral part of the proposed Concord field station study area. Contemporaneous documents support that conclusion:
There were six hundred donors: $67,000 from individuals and $427,000 from such local and national foundations as the Ford Foundation, Arthur Vining Davis, Avalon, Nature Conservancy, Permanent Charities, Concord Land Conservation Trust. Total Ford Foundation grants in the 1960s and early 1970s for the acquisition and development of the Field Station in Estabrook Woods and the supporting lab in Bedford totaled $32 million! (One would think that these sums would fund for Harvard a fine Estabrook ecological curriculum.)
[Photo of crow-sized Pileated Woodpecker in Estabrook by Jamie
Christian. Click for larger.] The MCZ's acquisition was hailed at the time as an outstanding example of cooperative stewardship and community unity. It was held out as a model for open space acquisition as an alternative to outright public ownership. Interesting new information has come to light about Ernst Mayr's reasons for creating a field station. In his mid-sixties proposal to the Ford Foundation for a grant to purchase a site in Estabrook Woods, wrote:
This proposal described the MCZ's criteria for a field station (a varied terrain, a tradition of careful public use, protection against human alteration for long periods, proximity to Cambridge, and a sufficient size to prevent edge disturbance). Dr. Mayr described the 670-acres in Estabrook Woods as "an almost ideal tract of land" (Report of the Museum Director, Annual Report: 1966-67, p. 6). The Ford Foundation proposal continued,
In June of 1966, the MCZ issued "Plans for Research at the Concord Field Station of the Museum of Comparative Zoology." This document proudly announced the creation of the CFS and suggested a curriculum of investigations of benefit to science and the environment. It concluded as follows:
For summary descriptions of Harvard's educational activities in Estabrook Woods, see bibliography. One publication summarized activities in the 1970s:
Thirty years later, on Jan. 14, 1997, Harvard's President Neil Rudenstine permanently dedicated to conservation its 700 acres in Estabrook Woods. Though the MCZ had been given it in the 1960s as an ecology study area, some in Concord perceived that the post-Mayr MCZ had less interest in doing research in Estabrook Woods. They feared Harvard would sell Estabrook for development as it had done with another property it had owned in town. Finally, in 1997, Harvard issued a legally-enforceable Notice of Public Charitable Obligation which, it is hoped, will permanently keep the land in its natural state. Harvard and the MCZ did this explicitly in recognition of the thirty years of efforts of the two towns, private land donors, and the Concord and Carlisle land trusts to provide, at great cost, a conservation buffer of more than four hundred adjacent acres, much of it protected by conservation restrictions. At the dedication ceremony [text here], President Rudenstine declared,
The Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs, Trudy Coxe, added,
The Countway Laboratory of the Concord Field Station in Bedford housed many of the natural history collections until 1999, when unfortunately most of the collections were dispersed and the CFS's Center for Population Studies was closed. Thus, in 2002, it is not clear whether the 1997 Rudenstine rededication ceremony will in fact result in the revitalization of ecology research programs in Estabrook Woods. The signs are discouraging. Though one recently-deceased professor carried on in the woods in the tradition of Mayr and Thoreau, the CFS, following the latest scientific fshion, has been less interested in natural history research the woods. (Now part of Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, it retains its affiliation with the Museum of Comparative Zoology.) At the time of its creation in the 1960s, the term "Concord Field Station" meant the Estabrook Woods. Because of recent unbalanced management priorities, the Concord Field Station is becoming only the "Bedford Lab Station." Recently, there is a glimmer of hope: a Harvard biology course, BS 55 "Population Biology: Ecology" used the woods for brief projects as part of an introduction to the ecology of the woods and species recognition. A web site helped the undergraduates hit the ground running: <http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/bs55/Web/Main_Page/Frames/EstabrookWoods_Frameset.htm>. And, significantly, in 2003 and 2005, Harvard supported a proposal to create in Estabrook Woods a premier environmental science curriculum jointly with Middlesex School, on the condition the School not develop its part of the Woods. (Harvard’s responsible official has said that he continues to work to dissuade Middlesex School from building in Estabrook Woods.) But Middlesex School so far has declined to participate, preferring soccer fields. Since the original $500,000 purchase of the MCZ lands with private funds in the 1960s, $2,500,000 in tax dollars have been spent to protect Estabrook Country: $653,000 from the towns of Concord and Carlisle for conservation purchases; $294,000 from state open space grants; and, in 1996, a $1.5 million federal "Forest Legacy" grant for a conservation restriction . Furthmore, additional private donations since 1970 of full-title parcels (such as the recent 60-acre Newbury donation) and conservation restrictions have been undoubtedly worth many additional millions. A conservative estimate of all puchases, grants, and donations to save the Woods might be a total of seven million dollars. (Estabrook became eligible for the $1.5 million federal grant because, on nomination by the state Department of Environmental Management, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture had honored the entire Estabrook Country by designating it an official Forest Legacy Area under an Act of Congress.) In October, 2001, Massachusetts in its BioMap designated the Estabrook Woods as one of its "Core Habitats," the preservation of which are needed to protect biodiversity. It is a fitting tribute to, and affirmation of, the century of observation and conservation that has occurred on this wild tract. The job is not finished, however. The Middlesex School development is the deepest and the most land-transforming proposal, and is one which the Concord Field Station wishes to dissuade. Other threats do exist, however-- such as the increase in aircraft noise from the increasing LaGuardia shuttle service from MassPort's Hanscom Field [for NPR broadcast on impacts of noise click here] and the intrusive, site-blind trophy-houses that suck wildness from Estabrook and give nothing back. |
Then
the director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Dr. Mayr
(pictured here) remains one of the world's greatest evolutionary
biologists and was a recent winner of the Crawfoord Prize, biology's
equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It was part of his effort to let the winds
of the living, natural world blow through the corridors of the academy and
to provide the MCZ (and the wider educational community) with a research
and teaching tool vital to the study of natural diversity (
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