CEDAR -- The hours Bill Habich spent hunting, hiking and canoeing through his former property along the Cedar River strengthened his respect for the ecological role and beauty of Michigan's wetlands.
The 100-acre plot is home to diverse wildlife and plant populations and provides the only walkable access to hundreds of acres of state land -- reasons, Habich said, he decided to sell the property to the Leelanau Conservancy last month.
"It has got a lot of neat things about the property and nobody ever did anything with it for about 50 years, so it's pretty natural. There is probably nothing realistically like it in the state," Habich said of the property he, and two partners, purchased three years ago.
"We could have sold it for more money in the open market, but we wanted to protect it. I knew personally it was too valuable," he said.
The swath of forested wetlands east of Cedar was the last privately owned property along the Cedar River, also known as Victoria Creek, between there and Lake Leelanau. The property links the Pere Marquette State Forest with Solon Township Park and, with the Cedar River Natural area along Lake Leelanau, and brings the area's total contiguous public acreage to 1,800 acres, Leelanau Conservancy officials said.
"The first big land purchase we ever did ... we purchased 120 acres at the mouth of the Cedar River. And now upstream, the last piece that was still in private hands we were able to buy this year, 20 years later," Conservancy Executive Director Brian Price said of the $225,000 deal. "What it means is the entire waterway from Lake Leelanau up to the village of Cedar is protected and open to the public."
More than 90 acres of the tract consist of wetlands forested with pockets of tamarack, eastern hemlock and white cedar. The remaining upland acreage along Schomberg Road serves as the only access from a public road north of the river.
"It possesses intact high-quality wetlands with a lot of ... unique plants and animals that depend on large tracts of undivided wetland that are found in this area," said Matt Heiman, the Conservancy's land protection specialist who worked on the sale. "It's rare to have as much undivided acreage. It really helps to ensure this resource remains as special and unique as it is."
Print this story
E-mail this story
