Matt Sinclair and his grandfather, Robert Hopkins, are hoping their gift of land in Manchester will give future generations an opportunity to be in nature.
MANCHESTER — Matt Sinclair explored the 100-acre woods behind his house almost daily as a kid. It was an entire world. He discovered mushrooms and centuries-old stone walls and foundations of long-forgotten homesteads and even moose on long treks to Jamies Pond and back.
“That property is a huge portion of my identity,” Sinclair said. “I built forts. I fished. I ran through the woods. Everything — my whole life has been tied up in that piece of property and exploring and just observing the beauty that is Mother Nature on a daily basis.”
Sinclair was the fifth generation of his family to explore the land. Before him, it was his grandfather, Robert Hopkins — and before Hopkins, it was his father and his father. But Sinclair and Hopkins, 93, weren’t quite satisfied with the two centuries of family history on the land. They wanted to preserve it — permanently.
Hopkins and Sinclair, over a cup of coffee, decided they would donate the land to the Kennebec Land Trust, a nonprofit that manages about 8,000 acres of permanently conserved land across Kennebec County and small portions of neighboring Androscoggin and Franklin counties.
That donation was finalized last month, with the land officially named the Hopkins-Sinclair Conservation Area. The Kennebec Land Trust will preserve the land for public access and wildlife in perpetuity.
Land trust Executive Director Theresa Kerchner said Sinclair and Hopkins reached out to the organization in July to begin the donation. She said she was inspired to learn about the family’s generational connection to the land and that they were so intent on preserving it — and not just for themselves.
Kerchner and her team recognized the newly donated land would connect directly to the 1,140-acre state-owned Jamies Pond Wildlife Management Area in Manchester, Farmingdale and Hallowell, as well as to the 68-acre Wagner Woods Conservation Area and Manchester’s own 228-acre conservation lands. The donation created a 1,500 contiguous acres preserved for permanent wildlife conservation.
Kerchner said the network also connects to 900 acres of rural, undeveloped land, which the land trust had already identified with state maps as being prime wildlife habitat.
This donation of land highlights evolving thinking about habitat preservation.
“It’s a great deal of undeveloped land that species like black bear, moose, all those wildlife species that have large home ranges, they need those large habitat blocks,” Kerchner said. “And we use those maps as we plan our conservation work. We work closely with state biologists to understand what their goals are and how they intersect with our board of directors’ goals here at the land trust.”
Sydne Record, an associate professor of landscape conservation at the University of Maine, has studied the impact of preserving large plots like the Hopkins-Sinclair land. Ecologists like her have begun reconsidering theories of conservation over the past decade, shifting their focus from preserving individual species to preserving high-quality, geologically diverse and well-connected land to serve as enduring habitats for hundreds of species.
“Our previous conservation efforts really focused on the actors — the organisms moving around on the stage,” Record said. “But what this movement that The Nature Conservancy and many conservation biologists have started to consider is that maybe we should actually be focusing on the stage.”
The idea behind focusing on habitat conservation, Record said, is that these key areas can house several rounds of organisms as Maine’s climate rapidly warms and species’ home ranges shift northward.
Ideally, she said, these preserved habitats would have a high level of land type variation — wetlands and woods and hills, for instance, all on the one stretch of preserved land — so that they can serve as habitats for as many species as possible.
That shift in focus has become increasingly important as smaller-scale habitats are affected by climate change.
By 2085, the climate in central Maine “could resemble current conditions in New Jersey, hundreds of miles south,” the Maine Climate Council said in a November report. The council recommended Maine convene stakeholders by the end of 2025 to develop a cohesive landscape conservation blueprint for key habitats across the state, at the risk of losing those habitats forever.
Record said she hopes her research team will be able to work more closely with landowners, state stakeholders and land trust groups like the Kennebec Land Trust with a new grant from the Northeastern States Research Cooperative. Cooperation can be difficult, Record said, but it could be crucial in making sure the right land is conserved.
“It’s a challenging thing where you have private landowners and public land, and trying to kind of fit together the jigsaw puzzle so that those ecological corridors can remain intact, but people can still be using the landscape for the resources that they need to be using,” she said.
The brand-new Hopkins-Sinclair Conservation Area already fit into one of those ecological corridors. But now, that corridor will be permanently preserved — even as the climate changes around the wildlife that lives there and as those species leave for greener, cooler pastures.
Sinclair said he often allowed other people to use the land whenever they asked, and it was a priority to make sure the land continues to be open for public hunting and bushwhacking. No official trails are planned for the property, but the public is free to explore.
“It was always like, ‘Yeah, we’re just stewards. We’re all passing through. There’s no permanency,'” Sinclair said. “So to think that we wouldn’t allow someone else to use it is kind of laughable to both of us. As long as you’re being kind, we encourage the use of the property.”
Source: Kennebec Journal
https://www.centralmaine.com/2025/03/08/my-whole-life-has-been-tied-up-in-that-piece-of-property/