Photography by Lauren Allen.
The Twelve Hills Nature Center will recognize 21 years of conservation and education with the Wild Beauty celebration at the Turner House this weekend.
The event will bring together Oak Cliff businesses and community members alike to celebrate how the neighborhood nonprofit center has grown over the last two decades.
Since getting involved in 2008, board chair Marcie Haley said that she has loved seeing the ecosystem develop with the great diversity of plants and wildlife that have come to the five acres.
“Every time I go out there, there’s something new to see,” she said.
Open dawn to dusk every day, the Twelve Hills Nature Center has a half-mile walking trail and a variety of wildlife. There are 1,400 species found within the center, including the discovery by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department of four different bat species (Eastern Red, Evening, Seminole and Tricolored Bats) last June. Other recently discovered species this year within the nature center include the Bumble Flower Beetle, a type of American hoverfly and the Magnolia Threetooth snail.
Additionally, 50% of the center’s land has been restored as native Blackland Prairie. Less than 1% of the original ecosystem remains throughout Texas, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
“It’s a place to teach the history and culture of the region, the heritage, where people can see what our Indigenous peoples saw and lived with, and what our settlers saw once they came and used to begin with,” Haley said.
The center brings in approximately 70 volunteers each year from the public and through a collaboration with the North Texas Master Naturalist program, logging over 2,000 volunteer hours from serving on the board to completing native plant maintenance. The center also provides a variety of events and free educational programs to the public, with some of those programs in partnership with local schools.
“Our big program is called Nature Leaders, and we’ve done that for over 15 years. It’s conducted in partnership with Rosemont Upper School, and we have an after-school program starting in February that runs once a week for 20 fifth graders,” she said. “They learn all about the Blackland Prairie ecosystem overall, what it is and all the different parts.”
The Nature Leaders program concludes with those students leading nature walks, accompanied by a Master Naturalist, to their entire school community for Pre-K through fifth graders.
Haley added that the center hosts the younger children from Rosemont Lower School through the Little Bisons program and often collaborates with the St. Cecilia Catholic School to develop programs as needed. Other local schools and teachers also bring their students in as they need to talk about the wildlife of the preserve, as it aligns with their curriculum, she said.
Future goals for the center include introducing weekend programming for children in addition to the current weekday programs.
This Saturday’s anniversary celebration is different from the ones of recent years. Haley said that the center hasn’t hosted an in-person fundraiser since pre-COVID and that a lot has changed and improved since.
“Last year, last April, we hit our 20-year mark, so we’re excited to be celebrating the big change that we had from the time that this was just an empty lot to now offering so many free opportunities for the public and a beautiful space to walk in,” Haley said. “And it’s a chance to support a beautiful nonprofit preserve where our entry and programming is always free to the community.”
The Wild Beauty celebration will take place Saturday, March 7, starting at 6 p.m. at the Turner House. Admission tickets are $125 and in-person raffle tickets are available for $25.
Updated March 4 at 5:42 p.m.
