The Story
Bramble Ridge Preserve carries the Ridge-to-River corridor down from Antler Gap Forest’s high oak canopy toward the valley floor below. The land ran cattle for nearly sixty years before the family that owned it approached us directly in 2018, wanting the ranch protected rather than subdivided once grazing operations wound down; we closed the acquisition the following year.
Oak regeneration has been the headline story since protection. Decades of grazing pressure had suppressed young oak recruitment across most of the property — cattle browse seedlings before they can get above reach — and our first vegetation survey in 2019 found almost no oaks under fifteen years old anywhere on site. Six years of exclusion later, the 2025 survey counted over 1,200 new oak seedlings and saplings established across the property, the beginning of the next generation of canopy.
Camera-trap data collected jointly with Antler Gap Forest confirms mountain lion and black bear cross between the two preserves regularly, using a narrow wooded draw that would have been the first thing cut through by the ridge-top subdivision Antler Gap once faced — a reminder that protecting one preserve without its neighbor would have left the corridor broken at exactly this point.
