The Babcock Nature Preserve is located in Eden, Vermont. The preserve comprises a 1,000-acre (1.4 km²) tract of boreal forest land owned and maintained by Johnson State College and the Vermont State Colleges for scientific and educational study.
The preserve is named for Robert and Anne Hanchett Babcock who donated the tract to the Vermont State Colleges. Robert Babcock was the first provost of the Vermont State Colleges, a member of the Vermont House of Representatives, and a lieutenant governor of Vermont serving under Governor Robert Stafford.
The landscape is dominated by three large ponds and a large, environmentally significant bog, providing a natural laboratory for field biology, ornithology and environmental science courses. A summer field program features a number of such courses designed to provide field experience in the environmental and natural sciences.
Famous quotes containing the words nature and/or preserve:
“Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.”
—Eastern proverb.
“The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)