Contact: Karen Bennett, Delaware Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, phone: (302) 653-2883 , e-mail: karen.bennett@state.de.us
or jennifer adkins, The Nature Conservancy, phone: (302) 654-4707

Community Plan to Preserve Rural and Nature Heritage of Blackbird Forest Area Now Available/ Plan Calls for Collaborative Action by Residents, Nonprofits, and Government

Strategies to preserve and protect the Blackbird-Millington Corridor, a 50,000-acre green band stretching across the Delmarva Peninsula from the Cypress Branch and Millington area in Maryland to the Delaware Bay at the mouth of Blackbird Creek, are outlined in an 80-page plan just released by The Nature Conservancy and the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

The Blackbird-Millington Corridor Conservation Area Plan is the culmination of a year-long community process to create a common vision for preserving the natural and rural heritage of the area. A broad coalition of non-profits, government agencies, and local residents in the Blackbird Forest area has worked together to understand how the landscape is changing and to develop realistic strategies for conservation.

The result is a set of 37 strategic actions that utilize voluntary, incentive-based, and non-regulatory mechanisms for achieving conservation. They fall into five categories – land protection, habitat restoration, promoting compatible economic uses, education, and research – and include strategies for creating new or improved public policies and funding for the Blackbird-Millington Corridor.

One of the most important conclusions to emerge from the planning process relates to the role of forests. After much study and discussion, scientists, farmers and local community members all agreed that maintaining and connecting healthy forests is the key to preserving natural habitat and the rural quality of life in the area. "I knew going in to this planning process that scientists would identify Corridor forests as important for maintaining natural habitat and air and water quality," says Jennifer Adkins, Blackbird Corridor Project Manager for The Nature Conservancy. "What I was less prepared for was the importance of forests to people who live in the Corridor – for privacy, hunting and other recreational opportunities, as well as concerns about clean water and air."

The Blackbird-Millington Corridor stretches across the Delmarva Peninsula, from the Cypress Branch and Millington area in Maryland to the Delaware Bay at the mouth of the Blackbird Creek. From a birds-eye-view, the relevance of Corridor forests is unmistakable – this 50,000-acre green band is identifiable as one of the last remaining forested hubs on the Peninsula. With only 25% of Delaware’s original forests remaining, maintaining forest cover in this area is a top priority. However, the Corridor also includes two ecologically rich stream systems (Cypress Branch and Blackbird Creek), extensive areas of tidal wetland habitat, and Delaware's highest concentration of coastal plain ponds – seasonal freshwater wetlands, sometimes called Delmarva Bays – that host an unusual collection of plants and amphibians.

These natural habitats remain intact today thanks largely to the good stewardship of farm families who have relied on this abundant landscape for generations for survival, recreation, and inspiration. With mounting growth pressure from the Middletown-Odessa-Townsend (MOT) area to the north and Smyrna to the south, preserving rural and natural lands in the Corridor is increasingly challenging. To meet this challenge, the Corridor plan proposes a variety of conservation tools and resources. Some of these resources currently exist and some of them would involve expanding programs available to nonprofit organizations, public agencies, and private landowners.

Karen Bennett of the Division of Fish and Wildlife sees the Blackbird-Millington Corridor Conservation Area plan as a potential model for future conservation planning efforts in Delaware. "The Blackbird-Millington Corridor Conservation Area Plan is an excellent example of the kind of cooperative, community-based planning for conservation that Delaware needs and that the Governor’s Livable Delaware initiatives seek to promote."

The Nature Conservancy and the DNREC Division of Fish & Wildlife are determined not to let this plan sit on a shelf. Already efforts are underway to implement many of the strategies. One such example is the use of a new DNREC Division of Fish & Wildlife Landowner Incentive Program to help Corridor landowners who want to restore key habitats on their properties by providing financial and technical assistance for reforestation and wetland and stream buffer restoration. Another strategy is the creation of a forest protection program modeled after the very successful Delaware Agricultural Lands Preservation program. The Department of Agriculture Planning Section and the Delaware Forest Service, with input from The Nature Conservancy and others, are developing a program to protect forests using mechanisms such as forest preservation districts and the purchase of development rights on forested land. This strategy has great potential for expanding forest preservation in the Corridor. Although this concept enjoys strong multi-agency consensus, it will require tremendous support from citizens and lawmakers to get this potential legislation passed and funded.

Residents can play a critical role in these and other strategies outlined in the plan. Maria Trabka, Project Director for The Nature Conservancy's Delaware Bayshores Program will be reaching out to priority landowners in the Blackbird-Millington Corridor. "There are options for people who want to preserve the rural and natural heritage of this place,” says Trabka. “We want to make sure that residents and landowners are aware of those options and the programs that can provide them with technical and financial assistance."

The Executive Summary and the full report of the Blackbird Millington Corridor Conservation Area Plan are available online at www.dnrec.state.de.us/cwcs.

The Blackbird-Millington Corridor Conservation Plan was funded, in part, through a grant from the Delaware Division of Fish & Wildlife with funding from the Division of Federal Assistance, United States Fish and Wildlife Service under the State Wildlife Grants Program. Additional support was provided by the Crestlea Foundation, the Efroymson Program, and members of the Delaware Chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

(A graphic is available in a high resolution digital PDF upon request.)

The Nature Conservancy is a leading international, nonprofit organization that preserves plants, animals and natural communities representing the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. The Nature Conservancy works in all 50 states and 28 countries. To date, the Conservancy and its one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 117 million acres in the United States and around the world. In Delaware, the Conservancy has preserved more than 28,000 acres of forests, river, beaches and marshes. Visit us on the Web at nature.org/Delaware.

The Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife is one of five Divisions within the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. The Division of Fish and Wildlife is responsible for managing Delaware's fish and wildlife resources, enforcing laws which protect these resources, controlling mosquitoes for public health and comfort, providing boating safety education, hunter education and aquatic resource education programs, and administering a statewide dog control program.
 

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