Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Cabe Foundation Awards Grant

The Horace C. Cabe Foundation of Gurdon recently awarded a grant of $56,500 to the Arkansas Field Office of The Nature Conservancy to assist in the acquisition and stewardship of Columbus Prairie, an 80-acre high-quality black land prairie in Hempstead County. Of the 12 million acres of original black land prairie in the United States, fewer than 10,000 acres of this vanishing prairie remain.

Columbus Prairie, with its unique black land soil, was an acquisition priority for the conservancy. It provides habitat for rare animal and plant species, including Henslow's sparrow (in winter), large flowered beard tongue (a spring-blooming, purple-flowered plant), and eared false foxglove (a summer-blooming, rose-flowered plant species known from only one county in Arkansas).

Black land prairies and woodlands are unique habitats, and more than 150 prairie and woodland plant species have been recorded at the site. Black land soils are high in calcium, having formed from a substrate of chalks and marls formed from marine animals that existed during the Cretaceous period 135 million years ago when the Gulf of Mexico covered the area.

Columbus Prairie is open to the public and managed as a nature preserve for the rare animals and plants that live there. Management activities include prescribed burns, cedar removal and continued inventory for additional rare species.

The Nature Conservancy is an international membership organization committed to the preservation of natural diversity. The mission of the conservancy is to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.

Since 1982, the conservancy's Arkansas Field Office and its 5,000 members have helped to protect over 220,000 acres of natural land throughout the state. Nationally, the conservancy has been responsible for the protection of more than 10 million acres in the fifty states, Canada and Latin America.

For more information on how to reach Columbus Prairie, call the conservancy office at 501-663-6699.