Oconee River Land Trust

10/13/2026

Thank you to everyone who came out for ORLT's Annual Hike & Happy Hour this past Sunday! We are grateful the weather cooperated for our gathering at Craig Greene and Jeanne Barsanti's beautiful permanently protected property in Oconee County. ORLT members, friends, board members, and staff explored the property, including the picturesque Wildcat Creek, and mingled over snacks and refreshments.

At the event, Executive Director Dan Crescenzo and Director of Engagement Hadrien Turner presented ORLT's annual awards to the following supporters:

• Michael and Louisa Barnsley received the Steward Award for effectively managing their property to maintain and restore its significant conservation value

• Lauren Gingerella (of Chickadee Conservation Consulting) received the Champion Award for volunteering with ORLT and supporting ORLT's conservation mission

• Babs McDonald and Ken Cordell received the Heritage Award for their commitment to conserving their beautiful land and for their substantial support of ORLT's mission. Congratulations to these award winners!

Thank you to Craig and Jeanne for hosting the event and sharing their land and their beautiful stories with everyone who attended. Additional thanks to DePalma's Athens and ABC Package for providing refreshments!

Photos by Roger Nielsen, Laura Hall, and Hadrien Turner

09/30/2026

https://www.gofundme.com/f/eagles-rest-park-at-mt-oglethorpe?attribution_id=sl%3A645d6e6a-e7c0-4809-9484-a06034febcc1&lang=en_US&ts=1789834862&utm_campaign=man_sharesheet_dash&utm_content=amp30-treatment-3&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link&cp_src=d

ORLT is working with the Mount Oglethorpe Foundation to permanently protect Eagle's Rest on Mt. Oglethorpe, a remarkable landscape with deep cultural, historical, and ecological significance.

The original terminus of the Appalachian Trail was once located here, and the mountain holds longstanding significance to the Cherokee and Creek peoples. Today, Eagle’s Rest Park welcomes visitors to explore miles of trails cared for by a dedicated crew of volunteers. Its forests provide important habitat and serve as a wildlife corridor, supporting a diversity of native plants including sassafras, wild hazelnut, trilliums, and bloodroot. The mountain’s forests and streams also help protect water quality in the surrounding landscape.

This special place is increasingly surrounded by development, making its permanent protection especially important. The Mount Oglethorpe Foundation is raising funds to help ensure the property is protected with a conservation easement held by ORLT.

Your support can help safeguard Eagle’s Rest Park for the people, plants, wildlife, and communities that depend on this land, today and for generations to come.

09/29/2026

Join Oconee Rivers Audubon Society for “Tracking Birds with Geolocators and the Motus Network,” featuring Garrett Rhyne, the Southeastern Motus Coordinator based in Athens. Garrett oversees implementation of the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network and tagging research supporting bird conservation across the region from Texas to Virginia. Where do our migratory birds go when they leave Athens, and where did they come from?

Miniature tracking devices have helped biologists uncover remarkable details about the movements of many of our favorite birds.

Join them to learn how these technologies are being used to study migration and how Athens has become an important center for migration research.

Thursday, Oct. 1 | 6:30–8:00 PM
Sandy Creek Nature Center
205 Old Commerce Rd, Athens, GA

Photo by Liz Conroy

09/25/2026

Early fall can be a bit of a toss-up when it comes to spotting interesting botany, but this ORLT conservation easement near Elberton almost always delivers.

The property stretches from managed longleaf pine savanna to a winding creek, with the creek being one of the best places to see what makes this property so special: its unique geology. That distinctive landscape supports an array of plants that can be easy to overlook, including the Carolina elephant’s foot (Elephantopus carolinianus). We were sadly a little too late to catch Starry Campion (Silene stellata) in bloom, but we’ll be back next year.

Perhaps the most exciting find of the visit was not a plant at all. We caught a glimpse of an Eastern Whip-poor-will, a famously elusive and camouflaged bird in the nightjar family. You've likely heard one before at night, but very few actually get to lay eyes on it, especially during the day. Luckily it stuck around on the ground for long enough for my student companion Graham (whip-poor-) Williams (Shoal Creek Sanctuary Volunteer-in-Chief) to get a snap of it.

Visits like these always remind us how much magic there is to discover on the lands ORLT helps protect.

-ORLT Land Steward Issac Ostrom

09/21/2026

Thanks to Birds Georgia for having us at their Fall Flyway Festival at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia at UGA , what a wonderful event. The talks by Lauren Gingerella of Chickadee Conservation Consulting and David Haskell were phenomenal! Great to see our friends Oconee Rivers Audubon Society holding it down too!

Thank you to Upper Oconee Watershed Network for including us in their 2026 Science and Policy Summit at the UGA Libraries Special Collections Library. We learned so much from local students, faculty, and experts (not that they’re mutually exclusive!) about research pertaining to and efforts around safeguarding the Upper Oconee watershed. We presented primarily on our initiative.

We are always honored by the opportunity to talk to new and old friends about the benefits of working with private landowners to permanently protect vital lands in the state of Georgia. 🍑🦉🌊

09/18/2026

Come see us at Birds Georgia's Fall Flyway Festival tomorrow at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia at UGA. We'll be tabling from 9AM to 11AM! 🦉

09/04/2026

This Labor Day weekend, choose to spend some sweat equity removing invasive plants at Shoal Creek Sanctuary!

Protected forever through an Oconee River Land Trust conservation easement, Shoal Creek Sanctuary is a special place where forests, streams, and wildlife come together. Thanks to their ongoing restoration efforts, the community has a chance to spend time on this beautiful landscape and experience what conservation makes possible.

Sunday 9/6/26
Shoal Creek Sanctuary | 75 Blue Heron Drive Athens, GA 30605
1:30 PM - 3:30PM

Learn more and find event details at https://uga.givepulse.com/event/854860-first-sundays-in-the-sanctuary-workday

Are you ready to make friends while annihilating invasive plants? Well, we’ve got the event for you! We are so excited for our First Sunday in the Sanctuary for September. We’ll be working towards our constant goals of increasing biodiversity in Athens.

sign up on GivePulse and bring gloves if you got ‘em! :)

09/04/2026

While monitoring a 194-acre ORLT conservation easement in Pickens County recently in some steamy weather, our Land Steward Hadrien observed salamanders (likely in the Desmognathus genus) and crayfish in a stream, native ferns and mountain laurel in the bottomland, and a beautiful population of Pink Lady's Slippers on a ridge. The property boasts a spring that flows into a tributary of Shoal Creek, supporting low-elevation seepy thickets and wetlands, alongside mixed pine-hardwood and oak forests.

09/01/2026

As National Make-A-Will Month comes to a close, we’re reflecting on the lasting impact we can make for the places we love.

For longtime conservationists Ken Cordell and Babs McDonald, that legacy means protecting the forests, streams, and wildlife habitat that have meant so much to them. By including the Oconee River Land Trust in their estate plans, they are helping ensure that more than 75 acres in Madison and Jackson Counties will remain protected for generations to come.

Their story is a reminder that conservation is about looking beyond the present. The lands we protect today help safeguard clean water, provide habitat for wildlife, reduce flooding, preserve Georgia’s rural landscapes, and strengthen our communities for the future.

A planned gift to ORLT is one way to make that commitment last. Whether through a will, trust, retirement account, life insurance policy, or gift of land, legacy giving allows you to support the future of conservation while maintaining control of your assets during your lifetime.

The greatest conservation legacy may be one whose full impact we never get to see but that continues protecting Georgia’s lands and waters long after we’re gone.

If you’ve included ORLT in your estate plans, we’d love to hear from you and welcome you into our legacy giving community.
If you’re considering a planned gift, please reach out, I’d love to talk to you.

- Hadrien Turner
ORLT Director of Engagement
[email protected]