Vermont Archives - Northeast Wilderness Trust

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New Conservation Camp Scholarship Established by Northeast Wilderness Trust

February 16, 2026/in Featured News, Press Releases

A version of this press release first appeared as “New Scholarship Sends NEK Youth to Buck Lake Camp” in The North Star Monthly on February 9, 2026.

MONTPELIER—Northeast Wilderness Trust, a regional land trust that focuses on wilderness conservation, announced today the creation of a new scholarship to send two local campers to Buck Lake Conservation Camp in Woodbury, Vermont each summer. Buck Lake is part of the Green Mountain Conservation Camps (GMCC), a program administered by Vermont Fish and Wildlife. The scholarship, partially funded by an anonymous donor and to be supplemented in the future by additional fundraising, honors Brendan and Dorothy Whittaker. Mr. Whittaker served as Secretary of the state’s Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) from 1978 to 1985.

Drone view of wetlands and Woodbury Mountain in Woodbury, Vermont from near Eagle Ledge. (Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve.)

The inspiration for the scholarship originated close by. Seville Murphy, a senior at Hazen Union School in Hardwick who has been both a camper and a junior counselor at Buck Lake, approached Northeast Wilderness Trust about the idea in early 2025.

“When I was working as a counselor at Buck Lake, I noticed that there were very few campers from Woodbury,” said Murphy. “I started thinking about how to get more Woodbury students into the GMCC camp.”

Murphy saw Northeast Wilderness Trust as a potential partner in that effort. He and his family live in Woodbury, not far from the Wilderness Trust’s 6,257-acre Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve, the largest nongovernmental wilderness area in the state. The Wilderness Trust’s sponsorship of a scholarship to send two local youths to Buck Lake, Murphy thought, would be a great way to enhance connections between the organization and the Woodbury community.

Around the same time, an anonymous donor contacted Northeast Wilderness Trust with the intention of seeding a scholarship in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker. That happy coincidence resulted in the creation of the Brendan and Dorothy Alden Whittaker GMCC Scholarship, which sent two campers to Buck Lake last year and will be available, contingent on further fundraising, for the same number of campers each coming summer.

“When Seville approached us with this idea, followed serendipitously by outreach from another supporter, the path forward became clear: Establish a scholarship to help ensure that the next generation of central Vermonters stays connected to the natural world and discovers the wild places in their backyards, like Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve,” said Jon Leibowitz, President and CEO of Northeast Wilderness Trust. “Efforts like the Green Mountain Conservation Camps are an essential way to encourage that immersion, and we are excited to give this opportunity to local families and to honor Brendan and Dorothy Whittaker.”

The scholarship is a fitting tribute to the Whittakers’ legacy. As ANR Secretary, as well as in other conservation-focused roles throughout his career, Mr. Whittaker made indelible contributions to Vermont’s environmental health and outdoor landscape. He represented Vermont in negotiations that led to the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), the first international agreement to address acid rain. He also took part in an international joint commission on water levels in Lake Champlain with fellow regulators from Canada and New York.

But Whittaker would like the scholarship to elevate more than just him and his professional accomplishments. “None of these achievements were solely my own,” he said. “They were all done by wonderfully dedicated staff.” He expressed a wish that the dedication and service of Edward Kehoe and Gary Moore, both former commissioners of Vermont Fish and Wildlife (then known as “Fish and Game”), are also honored by the scholarship.

Whittaker reserves the most praise, however, for his late wife of nearly 70 years, Dorothy. He and Dorothy, who passed away last year, raised three children and stewarded for more than 60 years an award-winning 67-acre tree farm in Brunswick in the Northeast Kingdom. Alongside a career in teaching, Dorothy was a talented gardener whose bounty of fruits and vegetables won a loyal local following at her roadside farm stand and on the menus of restaurants in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Looking forward, both Whittaker and Murphy hope the scholarship allows young people to connect more fully and reverently with the natural world. “It is indescribable and invaluable, especially today, to tear ourselves away from screens and to get outside. To immerse ourselves in the forest,” Whittaker said. “That’s the value of conservation camps.” Murphy agreed: “When you educate children at a young age, it fosters lifelong conservation practices and respect towards the land.”

The scholarship aligns well with Northeast Wilderness Trust’s mission. For the wilderness conservation movement to continue to grow, members of the next generation must be prepared to receive the torch from leaders like Mr. Whittaker. The Green Mountain Conservation Camps are an invaluable resource for equipping the next generation with the foundational skills for a career in the environmental field, and the scholarship will ensure this opportunity is available to two young central Vermonters every summer—whose experiences may someday inspire them to help conserve forever-wild landscape for Nature and people.

Those interested in contributing to the Brendan and Dorothy Alden Whittaker GMCC Scholarship may contact Anna Dundas, Development Director, at anna@newildernesstrust.org or 802.224.1000 x 104 for more information.

Studying Birds and Wildlands Ecology on the Great Plains

May 21, 2025/in Featured News, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

It’s difficult to imagine a starker contrast to Vermont’s humid, hardwood forests than the dry, flat, spiny sweep of a shortgrass prairie. As Northeast Wilderness Trust’s (NEWT) Wildlands Ecologist, I spend most of my time studying the former—traversing rolling, rewilding forests of hemlock, maple, birch, and spruce, dotted with beaver ponds and bogs. But on a late-spring morning in early May, I found myself at work in an almost unrecognizable landscape: binoculars in hand, surrounded by sagebrush, yucca, and cholla on the banks of the Purgatoire River in southeastern Colorado.

Perhaps the term “river” is a generous description for that particular waterway. In the Northeast, it would likely be called a “creek” or “brook,” but on these arid plains, which receive only about 12 inches of rainfall annually, this modest waterway serves as a vital corridor and safe haven for plants, wildlife, and people. For three days this May, it also became a meeting place for rewilding advocates from across the United States to network and discuss bird conservation.

How Beavers, Rewilding Allies, Transform the Landscape

March 31, 2025/in Featured News, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

Several years ago, I moved into a cabin in a cold mountain hollow adjacent to NEWT’s Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve. At the time, an alder swamp fed by the headwaters of Pekin Brook filled the bottom of the valley. According to the previous landowners, there had been a beaver pond there until floodwaters from Hurricane Irene breached the dam in 2011, draining the pond within minutes. With the area’s hardwood supply depleted, preventing the resident beavers from rebuilding the destroyed dam, they apparently chose to relocate. Over the 13 years since the beavers left, the pond transitioned first to a wet meadow, and then eventually to an impenetrable alder swamp.

According to Tom Wessells’ Reading the Forested Landscape, beavers will almost always return to the site of a previous pond, though they will usually wait until the woody vegetation reaches at least “pole size.” Since beavers receive most of their nutrition from cambium – the outermost layers of a tree – a decade-old alder swamp provides them with an abundant source of stems that are relatively easy to fell and transport, as well as plenty of cambium-filled surface area for them to chew on.

A Woody Window into Wildlife Habitat and Behavior

March 12, 2025/in Event, Featured News, Rewilding, Wildlife, Wildlife Ecology

As a member of NEWT’s Wildlands Ecology team, I study how ecological processes play out on our forever-wild preserves and easements. A key difference between these and managed forests is that the former tends to be “messier.” A walk through a rewilding forest, where human influence is minimal, will reveal landscape features like the exposed root balls of fallen trees (“tip-up mounds”) and other forms of dead and decaying wood strewn about the forest floor. This material, which scientists refer to broadly as “coarse woody debris” (CWD), is a critical ecosystem element that provides everything from homes for numerous species to vital soil nutrients. And because wildlands abound with CWD, which is often lacking in managed landscapes, they offer a terrific opportunity to better understand how wildlife interact with CWD as they go about their wild business.

To investigate further, I piloted a year-long CWD study at NEWT’s Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve in Vermont to examine whether the size of a CWD element, such as a fallen tree, plays a role in how different species of wildlife make use of it. I deployed five pairs of cameras, 10 cameras in total, on five of our preexisting research plots across Woodbury Mountain. At each plot, I pointed one camera toward a large piece of CWD (greater than 40 centimeters in diameter), and the other toward a small one (10 to 30 centimeters in diameter). The motion-activated cameras collected footage over five months.

Reviewing the Footage

After collecting the cameras, I sorted through the more than 5.5 hours of footage, which captured 23 species, including raccoon, Ruffed Grouse, white-tailed deer, and more.

Typically, the largest of the species recorded made use of the larger CWD: a bobcat perching on a large fallen tree, a black bear family dancing across an old yellow birch, curious coyotes sniffing the cameras after walking across gnarled, decaying logs. Moose stepped over large trunks and weasels settled on branches to wait for an opportunity at dinner.

The footage of the small CWD featured a different suite of species. Hermit Thrushes and other songbirds alit in search of a snack, while flying squirrels leapt from tree limbs. Mink scampered along a sunlit branch, fisher cats stopped as though enjoying the quiet, and chipmunks bounded along limbs of fallen tree crowns in pursuit of nuts and seeds.

In Support of Messy Landscapes

The CWD interactions documented by each of the 10 cameras are hallmarks of wilderness. Downed wood might look unsightly to us, but as the footage demonstrates, wildlife might depend on it for a diversity of uses. The family of bears ambling single file across a rotting birch suggests that some species take advantage of higher ground to monitor for threats. A flycatcher landing on a detached branch and zipping out to catch a flying insect highlights how these landscape features we might not notice on a walk in the woods serve a vital purpose for aerial insectivores, an ailing class of birds.

The ecological benefits of CWD showcased by the footage are many. Dead wood forms part of the structural complexity typical of old forests, which tend to host higher levels of biodiversity and sequester more carbon than their younger, cleaner counterparts. But the footage also peels back another layer of significance. It allows us to peer into the wild, untrammeled world; to see many of the Northeast’s revered species thriving in their natural habitat. And it shows them doing so on a property that, thanks to NEWT’s forever-wild conservation method, is protected as wilderness in perpetuity, where Nature directs the ebb and flow of life and our wild kin have the freedom to exist simply for their own sake.

New conservation easement helps protect 6,250 acres of ‘forever-wild’ lands

November 6, 2024/in Featured News, Press Releases, Rewilding, Wildlife Vermont

Vermont River Conservancy took the final steps to permanently protect more than 6,000 acres owned by Northeast Wilderness Trust at the headwaters of the Lamoille and Winooski Rivers, the organization’s largest undertaking in its 30-year history.

The “forever-wild” conservation easement ensures the property’s abundant wetlands and forests will be allowed to grow old over time, improving flood resilience for adjacent communities and protecting key wildlife habitat. The project was initiated by Northeast Wilderness Trust, which acquired multiple properties to create the expansive Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve and subsequently donated the conservation easement to Vermont River Conservancy. “Northeast Wilderness Trust conveys conservation easements to other land trusts to ensure permanence beyond our ownership,” said Caitlin Mather, Land Conservation Director at Northeast Wilderness Trust. “This added layer is the highest form of legal protection. We are grateful to have partnered with Vermont River Conservancy to achieve this forever-wild outcome.”

The Preserve protects the summit of Woodbury Mountain, Eagle Ledge, expansive wetlands, and 36 miles of headwater streams.

“All climate models predict central Vermont will see more drought and more floods, just as we’ve seen over the past 2 years. Protecting vibrant wetlands and allowing headwater forests to grow old is critical to rebuilding the spongy soils that store massive amounts of water – ultimately helping keep communities safer during droughts and floods,” said Erin De Vries, conservation director for Vermont River Conservancy.

Rare Lynx Sightings Put Carnivores and Wildlands in the Spotlight

October 24, 2024/in Featured News, Newts from the Field, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology, Wildlife Vermont

One of North America’s most elusive predators has grabbed the Vermont spotlight this autumn. A Canada lynx was sighted in August in Rutland County and has been spotted multiple times since in its journey north. Just seven sightings of the state-endangered and nationally threatened wildcat have been confirmed in Vermont, mostly in the Northeast Kingdom, since 2016. Northern New England forms the southern periphery of the lynx’s range, most of which spreads across Canada’s boreal forest.

According to Shelby Perry, Northeast Wilderness Trust’s (NEWT) Wildlands Ecology Director, the lynx in question was probably after love and land: “Like cougars and other wide-ranging carnivores, lynx will travel long distances in search of a home range and a mate. This lynx was likely on the move in search of a female and a place to settle down.”