A fine balance: Heard Museum celebrates decades of preservation, education

The Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary celebrated its anniversary earlier this month, marking 45 years of upholding one woman's love of Mother Nature.

The museum represents the legacy of the late Bessie Heard (1884-1988), a lifelong McKinney resident known for her progressive passion for nature preservation.

Since the day its doors opened, the museum has strived to maintain a sense of continuity when it comes to carrying out its founder's mission.

With seven miles of hiking trails and camps, field trips and natural science programs, the museum offers various educational programs intended primarily for children. The emphasis on educating families is a purpose carried down by Heard herself who, according to history, once held a birdhouse contest on her front lawn to teach local children how to care for the animals.

Even as McKinney falls in line with the rest of Collin County in terms of growth, the 289 acres that make up the museum symbolize one of the few places where one can experience the city before its urban sprawl facelift, said Stephanie Jennings, marketing and communications director for the Heard Museum.

"We've enhanced the mission by providing structured opportunities for kids to learn about nature," Jennings said. "[Heard's] objective was to have a place for promoting young children to learn about nature and science. I think everything we do contributes [to that] in some small way."

While museum staff and volunteers have been successful with preserving the unaffected atmosphere throughout the decades, today it is surrounded by development on virtually all sides, making preservation more of a challenge, Jennings said.

For example, construction is currently nearing completion on the newest residential venture, Serenity, which is located directly in front of the museum.

"They're really nice houses, but you can see them literally across our driveway," Jennings said. "There's only so much we can do with what surrounds us but we work with a lot of our neighboring communities to show them what we have to offer."

A landfill jutting up to another side of the sanctuary has also been there for years but has never posed any real threats, Jennings said.

While she said there are no hard feelings toward McKinney's progress, Jennings said the proximity of these projects have made keeping the sanctuary a quiet wildlife refuge just that more difficult.

"The challenge is keeping it new while at the same time upholding preservation," she said. "We keep it natural. It's more about not adding and using what we can in a way that doesn't disturb what we have. It's a fine balance."

Heard was 80 years old when the Heard Museum opened. Its mission is threefold: education, conservation and preservation. Today, the museum and sanctuary serves more than 100,000 visitors annually.

Heard is described as a woman who never settled for the traditional, known as the first woman to straddle a horse in McKinney, as well as the first female to ride a bicycle in town. Living in a time when the term "environmentalist" was rarely used or understood, Heard was a pioneer in her own rite, as evidenced by her collections of seashells, butterflies and nature prints.

Heard's appreciation for nature and her desire to pass on a heritage of conservation to future generations can be seen outside of the Heard Museum, as many of the hackberry trees are still growing along some of the downtown streets today, products of her first civic activity.

Staff and volunteers care for several different ecosystems throughout the year. A lot of the property is prairie and requires "prescribed" burns every several years to help maintain its grassy topography. There is also a heavy emphasis on making sure the sanctuary reflects only those plant species native to the area by preventing invasive entities like Bermuda grass, bamboo and other plants typically carried in by animals.

In 1992, the museum incorporated wetlands into the sanctuary, complete with an observation deck, floating study laboratory and boardwalk. Combined, the prairie and wetlands are home to deer, raccoons, beavers, possums, bobcats and coyotes, as well as numerous species of indigenous birds, amphibians, reptiles and plant life.

The museum is also home to the state's oldest bird banding station, where volunteers work with Cornell University in monitoring these species for scientific study and making them identifiable.

"Prairies - especially Blackland prairies - are so rare now," Jennings said. "There's a lot more scarcity and that's why ours is so valuable, because a lot of it has been turned into farmland. To the untrained eye it's just grass, but a lot of animals rely on that for sustenance and habitat."

Special events like Saturday's Halloween at the Heard, "Dinosaurs Live!" and its Trails of Lights during the holidays have helped the museum attract more visitors each year without changing its layout. An amphitheater, ropes course for team building and a science resource center, are other ways in which the Heard Museum has grown with the community over the past several years, Jennings said.

"I think she would like what's been done," Jennings said. "The fact that we're pretty much bordered on one side by one development or the other ... At the time she purchased this is was all blank land and now it's not. I think that proves her point - if this hadn't been set aside it could be part of any number of surrounding developments."

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