Heald Tract, Wilton
Size: 975 acres

Recreation: Hiking, fishing, birding, nature walks, picnics.

What you didn’t know: Maintaining the old fields and apple orchards encourages diverse wildlife not usually found in deep forests.

What to look for: Beaver, otter, great blue heron, hares, fox, deer and moose, and an amazing array of warblers.

The inside scoop:

To people who know it – who grew up fishing here, or exploring these shorelines and orchards – it is a precious remnant of what once seemed unchangeable.

Blazed trails lead along the shorelines of Heald and Castor Ponds – habitat for great blue heron, beaver and otter – through old orchards, fields and woodlands. In spring, vernal pools here teem with life; in summer, shaded rock ledges invite afternoon picnics. At apple blossom time, the orchards are festooned in white and rosy pink.

Richard Jordan helps the Forest Society care for this land. But, he said, many other people care for it, too.

“I’ve run into people that come out there intentionally to pick up trash…who just participate in taking care of it,” Jordan said. “There’s a good feel about that.”

This reservation now stretches over 975 acres. Phil Heald and his siblings, Ross Heald and Helen Rader, have donated vast tracts of their ancestral farmland to the Forest Society over the past two decades.

The early succession habitat provided by the old orchards and fields makes this tract “a place where you can find some interesting things,” says the Forest Society’s Gary Stansfield.

“Most of New Hampshire now is forested, and fields actually provide a totally different wildlife scenario,” Jordan says. On the Heald land there are “hares, rabbits and fox - and a lot of animals that you don’t get in a mixed hardwood and hemlock kind of forest; and a lot of different species of warblers in spring and summer.”

Beavers find these ponds attractive – and the trails provide views of their lodges and wend through places where the animals have cut timber for building.
“The big lodge looks like it’s got in-law quarters,” Jordan says. In the cold of winter, steam for the animals’ heat rises from the top of the lodge.

Raynold Jackson has worked with Phil Heald and others building trails here for over a decade.

“I have just given myself that assignment,” he says. “I’m always going to take care of it as long as I’m around.”

This tract, he said, shows people that they “don’t have to go to the White Mountains to enjoy the forest. We hope it offers a nice first adventure for families.”

“It’s a relaxing [place],” Jackson concludes. “I don’t know if it’s something in the air; it just makes you feel down to earth again. You can…reset yourself.”