Danner Family Preserve spans the Yorktown-Putnam Valley town line and the border of Westchester and Putnam counties.

Set on overgrown farmland, the preserve consists of old field habitat, thick with gray dogwood other early successional shrubs. It’s a habitat that has become rare as our area’s woods have grown older and the result is that birds reliant on it—indigo bunting, prairie warbler and rufous-sided towhee—have also become rare.

Eugene and Josephine Danner, who had owned the land for several decades, donated the property to Westchester Land Trust in late 2007, after donating a conservation easement on it to the Yorktown Land Trust and the Putnam County Land Trust. They were inspired by a neighbor’s donation of 436 acres for a state park nearby.