Hackmatack Refuge Honored During Plank Ceremony in Florida

Two new national wildlife refuges that the The Trust for Public Land helped create were among a group of seven refuges honored Friday, Jan. 11, by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge in Indian River, Fla.

Salazar on Friday officially announced the establishment of the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge.

The Valle de Oro refuge in Albuquerque, N.M., and the Hackmatack Refuge in northern Illinois and southeast Wisconsin were named as part of a commemorative plank ceremony at Pelican Island, the nation’s original wildlife refuge.

"At The Trust for Public Land, we are always working to provide close-to-home chances for people to get outside and enjoy the outdoors,” said Will Rogers, President of The Trust for Public Land.

“We’ve partnered with the Fish and Wildlife Service to establish two new refuges in urban areas - Valle de Oro NWR in Albuquerque, and the Hackmatack NWR near Chicago. We appreciate Secretary Salazar's leadership as well as that of Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe to make our wonderful system of national wildlife refuges as accessible to as many Americans as possible."

The ceremony honored a total of six new refuges, along with one more which was renamed. The Trust for Public Land joined Sec. Salazar at the event to lay the new refuge commemorative planks on the Pelican Island boardwalk.

The Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge includes an estimated 3.5 million people who live nearby, including the cities of Chicago and Milwaukee. It will include noncontiguous properties, especially tallgrass prairie patches, wetland properties, and oak savannah parcels, located in the northwestern region of the Chicago metropolitan area and the southern part of the Milwaukee area.

The refuge's boundaries encompass parts of McHenry County and Walworth County, Wis. The refuge will be operated by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service with 85 percent of the refuge in Illinois, and 15 percent in Wisconsin.

Plans for the refuge call for expanded recreation and environmental education. The Trust for Public Land partnered with a variety of local partners on the project, chiefly Friends of the Hackmatack, a group of local residents whose work was the impetus for the refuge; Openlands; and the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club.

Founded in 1972, The Trust for Public Land is the leading nonprofit working to conserve land for people. Operating from more than 30 offices nationwide, The Trust for Public Land has protected more than three million acres from the inner city to the wilderness and helped generate more than $34 billion in public funds for conservation.

Nearly ten million people live within a ten-minute walk of a Trust for Public Land park, garden, or natural area, and millions more visit these sites every year.

Learn more at tpl.org (http://www.tpl.org/)