Westport resident helps grow preserve
WESTPORT — Back in the 1700s, colonists would travel the now wooded area known as the Bill Kutik Honey Hill Preserve along the Weston-Wilton line.
The open fields and livestock that filled the landscape there, possibly as late as the 1870s, are long gone but some signs of the agrarian past remain with stone walls peppered throughout the now 119-acre preserve overseen by the Aspetuck Land Trust.
It’s a site Westport resident Bill Kutik is very familiar with and one he will forever be connected with by name and legacy after he helped the trust get the 10 acres to connect it with the 705-acre Weston Wilton Forest Reserve.
“It’s a 12-minute drive from our house. So I have been up there a lot and knew it quite well,” said Kutik, a retired journalist and computer business consultant who serves as an Aspetuck Land Trust board member. “This preserve is large enough that you can really lose yourself in nature.”
Aspetuck Land Trust named the Honey Hill Preserve for him last year and this year named Kutik “Conservationist of the Year” for his donation.
In 2021, Kutik pledged $500,000 in stocks over five years to the conservation group, which it plans to use to cover the purchase of the approximately 10 acres in Wiltonto prevent it from being developed.
The preserve includes more than 100 white pines and a roughly 2,000-foot dirt path its conservationists say traces as far back as 1730, according to the land trust.
Kutik’s donation ended a plan by a former property owner, who town officials say planned to build two houses on the roughly 10-acre land and a driveway to connect the property to a larger road. A few years ago, Aspetuck Land Trust began noticing that a part of the approximately 2,000-foot dirt path — known as Old Two Rod Highway — was widened with gravel applied to it, which in part caused members to believe that a section of it was being converted into a driveway, Executive Director David Brant said.
The plans followed a 2010 Superior Court decision that determined the property owners were among those who had right to use the dirt path by “convenience and necessity.” It also declared the path a public road owned by the town of Wilton, which discontinued it years later in response to the decision.
Aspetuck Land Trust had been attempting to buy the 10acre land from the previous owners for about a decade, Brant said.
“We didn’t want open space to kind of conflict with development. When people go for a hike, they want to kind of feel like they’re getting away,” Brant said. “This area is so unique because it is one of the last, basically undeveloped areas in Fairfield County.”
Kutik said he wanted to prevent houses from being built in the wilderness there.
“So I suggested that they use my money to buy the 10-acre parcel which they had been negotiating about,” he said.
The Bill Kutik Honey Hill Preserve is part of Aspetuck Land Trust’s ongoing efforts to prtoect the 705-acre Weston Wilton Forest Reserve. In a 2018 announcement of the plan, the land trust said the area includes those “critical to the long-term survival of native Connecticut species threatened by the effects of climate change and fragmentation from development.”
“Interior forest blocks larger than 500 acres provide critical habitat for birds, especially, and other species versus smaller pieces,” Brant said. “It’s all about creating more resiliency in the landscape so when species are stressed, they have lands that they can still access and go to.”
To protect the habitat, the land trust seeks to buy and connect land within the planned Weston Wilton Forest Reserve. Along with the 10 acres Kutik helped acquire, the group also bought 85 acres of land from the town of Weston, which it calls the Daniel E. Offut Forest Reserve Gateway, which it connected to the Bill Kutik Honey Hill Preserve to serve as an entrance for the area.
“It’s such a large area that is undeveloped,” Brant said. “That’s why we’re focusing on picking off these properties within it so that we can kind of create this much larger area of open space.”
Brant envisions the area benefiting its wildlife and providing a “wonderful” hiking spot for residents.
“Bill Kutik’s gift allowed us to protect 10 acres of land from development in the middle of our forest reserve,” Brant said. “It not only helped us protect 10 acres, but it also prevented the building of a road through our Honey Hill Reserve.”