Mountain Brook resident wins statewide conservation award

Jody Thrasher likes to burn things down. But he says that’s a good thing. 

“Prescribed fire is what I am really interested in and enjoy doing,” he said. “I want this place to be pristine long after I’m gone.”

That place — a 1,128-acre piece of land he owns along Hatchet Creek in Coosa County — is now a conservation easement, thanks to work he’s done recently with the Freshwater Land Trust. 

“I still own the land, but in many ways, I’ve kind of preserved it in perpetuity,” said 

Thrasher, a Mountain Brook resident. “No development of any kind will occur on that stretch, forever.”

The land is routinely maintained with fires. And it has earned him the title of Alabama Wildlife Federation’s Land Conservationist of the Year at the 2023 AWF Governor’s Conservation Achievement Awards banquet in August.

Thrasher said the “very rare” habitat that is the historical ecosystem of Mountain Brook — the Montane longleaf pine woodland — needs fire to continue to thrive and support its diverse ecosystem.

“Historically, fire burned over all these mountains in Birmingham on a three-to-five-year interval,” Thrasher said, explaining that the blazes burn up other species that overgrow and shade out wildflowers, grass and new longleaf saplings. “When the fires are gone, what happens to the woods is you get oak trees and poplar trees that migrate up to the top of the mountains.”

The fires are only the start of his work — he’s also protected river canebrakes and worked with natural resource professionals to protect rare fish and aquatic species on his property.

His land, which runs along a 3.3-mile stretch of Hatchet Creek, is home to dozens of species of fish and animals, including one of the largest remaining spider lily — or Cahaba lily — shoals in the world.

“It’s in probably one of the most remote and wild areas east of the Mississippi,” Thrasher said. “There are trees that are 300 or 400 years old. If you can preserve places like that and restore the portion of the property that has been kind of touched by man — I don’t think there’s anything more important I do than that.”’

He said conservation is his “family business.” His grandfather was employed by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources for years, and his father became president of AWF in 1991, when Thrasher was around 12 years old. 

He remembers spending lots of time in his young years collecting acorns and going out to plant trees with his dad.

“We probably planted hundreds of thousands of trees,” he said.

Thrasher said his Christian faith teaches him that people were created to be stewards of what they’ve been given.  

“What you realize over time is that you can buy things like land with money and your name is on a paper at the courthouse, but that’s not exactly true that we own it — we really just rent,” he said. “Long after we’re gone, what could the future generations say about us? What did we do that would be important to them?”

In his “day job,” Thrasher works as a controller for Bag Supply Company, but in his spare time, he’s out on the creek fly fishing and teaching his kids how to care for the land. He said everyone can help, and it’s OK to start small.

“We live in a world of wounds, and you see a lot of wrongs,” he said. “I’m trying to make those wrongs right. I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life.”