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Stafford couple always knew who their woods really belonged to--not to them, but to the birds. Date published: 4/27/2010
After a life at sea, Larry Valade was happy to retire to a home in the Stafford County woods with his wife, Thyra, in the mid-1980s.
He'd commanded a Polaris submarine, the USS Andrew Jackson, and spent years as a surface sailor. As a Navy wife, Thyra had weathered more than 20 family moves and done most of the day-to-day raising of the couple's five children. But now the kids were grown, and at their new home Thyra poured her energies into her garden and into her new passion, birding. Together the couple traipsed through their White Oak-area woods marveling at scarlet tanagers, wood thrushes, red-shouldered hawks and woodpeckers galore: hairy, downy, red-bellied and pileated. In summertime, when the dense oaks hid the birds from view, Thyra Valade could identify them just by their songs. Many years later, in the early 2000s, the couple noticed a survey marker just on the other side of their property. They investigated and found that a developer envisioned a dozen new homes on about 60 acres of woods. "What are the birds going to do?" Larry Valade recalls Thyra asking. "This is all going to be houses." They couldn't do anything about property they didn't own. But they could do something about their own land. With the blessing of their children, Kathleen, James, David, Bruce and Donald, the Valades determined to give the 20 acres adjacent to their home to a conservation organization that would keep it as a sanctuary for the birds, forever safe from development. It turned out not to be such an easy thing. Twenty acres, it seemed, was small pickings in the conservation world. But eventually they did find a willing taker--two, actually. The University of Mary Washington accepted a gift of the property in 2007 and plans to keep it as a bird sanctuary and outdoor classroom. And the Northern Virginia Conservation Trust agreed to hold the easement that prevents the land from ever being developed. While major donations of hundreds or even thousands of acres are celebrated with news coverage and public ceremony, the Valades' quiet gift also deserves praise, said UMW associate professor of biology Andrew Dolby.
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