New Project for Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program

Brightside Acres is proud to participate in the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP), sponsored by the USDA and managed by the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS).

Most of our land is timberland, which we have made a commitment to manage in a manner that most directly promotes plant and animal species diversity. Indeed, most of our products are crafted from fruit that is the produce, the living proof, of a healthy forest.

It turns out that diversity of habitat is a prerequisite for diversity of species. Birds are a wonderful example.

At Brightside we maintain some land as mowed meadows, which are the preferred hunting grounds for raptors. We maintain other areas in woody shrubs, blackberry and raspberry among them, where turkey, grouse, and woodcock are happy. And we cultivate the forest edge, areas preferred by migratory songbirds (and also by serviceberry and gooseberry), by clearing small half-acre pockets here and there and by cutting back and seeding select old roads.

In all of these efforts we have been encouraged and aided by the WHIP program.

This summer’s WHIP project involved clearing a half-acre plot on a densely wooded ridgetop, an endeavor requiring hundreds of hours of labor. We seeded the opening with red, white and ladino clover and perennial rye.

What was once a vast monoculture of mature hardwoods is now home to a tiny oasis of light. A place that will draw, not just birds of all kinds but mammals great and small.

And all the berry seeds they bring with them.