Wild about wildways

John Davis has dedicated career to preserving wildlife corridors. He seeks more recognition for one in his own backyard.

By Mike Lynch

Rewilding advocate John Davis has trekked thousands of miles to promote wildlife corridors on the East and West coasts, but there is one landscape that he says needs more attention, and it’s literally in his backyard.

Located in the Champlain Valley, the Split Rock Wildway is a forested corridor that connects the 3,700-acre Split Rock Wild Forest on the shores of Lake Champlain with the 7,951-acre Jay Mountain Wilderness and the High Peaks region. The Adirondack Forest Preserve lands are more than 12 miles apart as the crow flies.

Thirty years ago, Davis climbed a hemlock tree atop a knoll in the Champlain Valley and looked out to see a swath of forestlands weaving through the valley’s farmlands. 

“I realized it’s a wildlife corridor,” said Davis, the Adirondack Council’s rewilding advocate and the executive director of the Rewilding Institute, which works on a national level to support wildlife conservation. 

That site of his climb is now his home and is known as the Hemlock Rock Wildlife Sanctuary, 55 acres at the foot of Coon Mountain in Westport. The preserve contains a “forever wild” easement that Davis donated to the Northeast Wilderness Trust (NEWT) in 2003, the nonprofit’s first easement in New York. The land will transfer to NEWT when he dies. 

Davis is also a board member for the Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative, the conservation-minded Eddy Foundation and founder of the Wildlands Network. He’s known for two adventures to promote wildlife linkages. For TrekEast, he traveled through the woods and towns for more than 7,000 miles from Florida to the Northeast. He ventured from Mexico to British Columbia for TrekWest. 

Split Rock Wildway draws from concepts from the Adirondack Council’s 2020 Vision report from the 1980s that called for a Champlain Valley Preserve in the area of Westport and Essex, Davis said. 

He estimated it needs at least 15,000 acres of protected lands to be complete. “We’re about halfway there,” he said. That doesn’t include a southern arm of the wildway to the High Peaks that some organizations have championed in recent years. 

Many wildway lands are protected by nonprofits. The Adirondack Land Trust owns the 400-acre preserve on Coon Mountain, while NEWT, Champlain Area Trails and Eddy Foundation have protected lands within the wildway and have played leading roles in supporting it. 

“We want to make sure that Split Rock Wild Forest has connections to other larger forests because if it doesn’t over time its biodiversity can decline,” said Champlain Area Trails Executive Director Chris Maron, an Eddy Foundation board member.

Tom Butler is a longtime conservationist and co-founder of NEWT who has known Davis since childhood and worked with him throughout his career. 

He says the wildway provides animals a pathway from the shores of Lake Champlain, about 100 feet above sea level, to the High Peaks, standing some 4,000 feet, the highest points in the state. 

“The best way to make sure that natural communities can adapt to a changing climate is for them to have lots of elevational gradients,” Butler said. 

Despite its local support, Split Rock Wildway needs greater backing, Davis said. He would like to see the state address it and other wildlife corridors more thoroughly in New York’s Open Space Plan, which guides land protection strategies and is expected to be revised in coming years. That could lead to state land purchases or easements to build the wildway. 

“I’d like to see the state more wholly invested in it and acknowledge that it is a wildlife corridor,” he said. 

The state Department of Environmental Conservation said it’s aware of the Split Rock Wildway and acknowledged its importance on a local level, but it’s more focused on larger connections that are recognized by The Nature Conservancy’s Staying Connected Initiative. That project recognizes 13 wildlife linkages, including a few in the Adirondack region. 

The Adirondack linkages include ones from the central Adirondacks to the Green Mountains through the lands between Lake Champlain and Lake George, the Tug Hill Plateau to the western Adirondacks, Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario to the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the Adirondacks.

Davis supports the conservancy initiative, but said the Split Rock Wildway is an opportunity being missed. With a more concerted effort, the linkage could be completed in the coming decades, he said. 

“The wildway should be given equal priority with the other wildlife corridors even though it’s smaller because it’s nearer to being done,” Davis said.

Photo at top: John Davis stands atop Coon Mountain in the Split Rock Wildway in Westport. Photo by Mike Lynch