Bow Wow Woods
A million-dollar project to conserve land in Sheffield and Egremont.
Thanks to foundation grants and a generous gift from a long-time Land Trust member, there’s a $500,000 challenge. We’ve raised $300,000. There’s $200,000 left to go!

The Sheffield Land Trust, the Egremont land Trust & Greenagers

are working together to purchase, protect and maintain this important woodland property that connects to hundreds of acres of protected land.

Bow Wow Woods - 54 acres along Route 41 and Bow Wow Road where Egremont borders on Sheffield - is a diverse mix of wooded uplands and swampy lowlands. As noted author and ecologust Tom Wesseld said after leading a nature walk there in September, “As a forest that supports a diverse array of plants, Bow Wow Woods is a place that should be protected.”

Three nonprofits - the Sheffield land Trust, the Egremont Land Trust, and Greenagers - have joined together to purchase and protect Bow Wow Woods. Its purchase stats a new phase in conserving the significant landscape known as the Sheffield-Egremont Agricultural, Ecological & Scenic Corridor in southeastern Egremont and northwestern Sheffield.

The old logging road that snakes up a ridge throuhg the forest of conifers and deciduous trees is a good start on an easy walking trail. Nearby lowlands and wetlands are home to ferns, liles and many endangered species. The diverse ecology makes Bow Wow Woods a perfect place for Greenagers to expand its programs of conservation, education and youth-led land stewardship. April Hill, Greenagers’ headquarters on Route 41, is less han a mile away. Greenagers, which now owns the land , is acting as its day-to-day steward. The two land trusts will hold a conservation restriction on the property and share the duty of monitoring the land to make sure it remains protected.

The challenge

Thanks to the generosity of the Berkshire Environmental Endowment Fund, an anonymous foundation, and several private benefactors, the three organizations are able o offer a on-to-one challenge to raise the $1,000,000 needed to purchase and permanently protect the land and to set up the stewardship funds that will maintain and monitor it for future generations.

It’s a dollar-for-dollar match

That means that every dollar you give will be matched by the $500,000 challenge! Contributions can be sent to any of the three organizations (addresses below) with a notation “Bow Wow Woods & Corridor.” Thank you for your generosity!

The context

Bow Wow Woods is an essential link in the Sheffield-Egremont Agricultural, Ecological and Scenic Corridor, a relatively intact natural and rural landscape that extends from the Housatonic River to the Taconic Mountains. So far, the Sheffield and Egremont land trusts have helped families to conserve more than 1,200 acres of spectacular fields, forests and wetlands in the first four phases of the Corridor project. That land connects to more than 5,000 protected acres, including the Appalachian Trail and the Mount Everett and Jug End State Reservations. The importance of this landscape, and of the Bow Wow Woods as the anchor for the fifth phase of the Corridor, is the reason for additional grant support from the Wild East Action Fund, which seeks to acceleerate the pace of conservation in the Appalachian Trail Corridor.

The partners