Sturdy and feisty at 68, Ireland is a limited partner of the Wall Street investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., where her brother is a retired general partner. Never married, she is taking extraordinary measures to ensure that her heirs -- nieces and nephews -- won't be tempted to sell off her half of Foshalee to meet estate taxes, or simply to cash in, when she dies. To preserve Foshalee and the arcane hunting rites that it supports, Ireland has turned to a 22-year-old provision of the federal tax code that lets property owners take tax deductions by donating the land development rights to qualified conservation Land Trusts.
A little more than two years ago, Ireland granted a conservation easement to Tall Timbers Research Station, a 40-year-old nonprofit group in Tallahassee that has pioneered research in land and forest management, fire ecology and conservation. Donating the easements serves two goals. It reduces the value of the property, thereby lowering the inheritance taxes her heirs will owe. It also prevents any subsequent owners from developing the plantation. "I want to make sure my nieces and nephews can't put strip malls on the property," Ireland says bluntly, her words like a blast from the vintage double-barreled Arrietta shotgun favored by many quail hunters.
"Miss Kate" -- as she's known throughout the region -- isn't satisfied with preserving only her property, however. She relentlessly lobbies her neighbors (and a nephew who owns the balance of Foshalee) to join her in putting their land in conservation easement trusts. "I'm trying to emphasize that this region is a mecca and we have to maintain it," she says.
Ireland's Foshalee -- an Indian word meaning "dry lake" -- is just one of 80 plantations comprising some 300,000 acres in the Red Hills region, which is bounded by Tallahassee and I-10 on the south, Thomasville, Ga., on the north, the Aucilla River on the east and the Ochlockonee River on the west.
The plantations grew cotton until after the Civil War, when wealthy industrialists from the North began buying them and turning them into vacation homes and hunting preserves.
Ireland's father's family made a fortune in the coal and iron ore business in Cleveland and began buying property in north Florida just before the turn of the century. He acquired Foshalee in 1949. Industrial families such as the Whitneys and Hannas have owned plantations in the Red Hills for decades. More recently, a new breed of plantation owner has arrived, including T. Wayne Davis, whose family controls the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain, and Leslie Wexner, founder and chief executive of Limited Inc., the Columbus, Ohio-based chain of women's clothing stores.
So far, the owners of about 20 plantations encompassing more than 50,000 acres have put their land in conservation trusts. Among the donors is media mogul Ted Turner, who donated the easement rights for his Florida plantation, Avalon, to the Nature Conservancy. The owners of another nine plantations amounting to around 16,000 acres are in the process of donating conservation easements, says Kevin McGorty, director of the Red Hills Conservation Program at Tall Timbers. The organization's goal is to get 100,000 acres, or one-third of the total acreage in the Red Hills, under conservation easement within three years. "If we want to save open space, we can't do it all with federal government acquisitions," McGorty says.
At the heart of Ireland's passion for the Red Hills is the bobwhite quail, a fist-sized bird of about five ounces whose mottled plumage of browns, whites and black makes it especially difficult to spot on the ground. The Red Hills region is considered one the best habitats for the game birds in the country and draws hunters from around the world. There are several commercial hunting plantations in the area, including Foxfire Plantation and Hunting Preserve, outside of Thomasville.
Indeed, if not for the bobwhite quail, it's questionable whether many of the plantations would be around today. "The bobwhite quail is to the Red Hills what grapes are to Bordeaux," says McGorty, referring to the best known of France's wine-making regions.
Ireland and other plantation owners go to considerable effort and expense to ensure the wild birds thrive on their properties. To attract the quail and create open fields of fire for the hunting season, which runs from Nov. 17 to March 1, the owners clear away underbrush each year by setting controlled burns -- a forestry management technique dating back to the Seminole Indians that has been studied and improved by scientists at the Tall Timbers Research Station. Every year, during the last week of February, the whole plantation belt goes up in flames. (Last year, the late Gov. Lawton Chiles assembled the Governor's Wildfire Response and Mitigation Review Committee to explore the use of controlled burns in curbing forest fires like the ones that destroyed thousands of acres of pine forests last summer.)
Workers on the plantations, including many African-Americans whose families have lived on the land since the days of slavery, maintain the plantations during the summer months and support hunting parties during quail season.
The hunting itself proceeds according to time-honored ceremony little-changed since the introduction of bird dogs and the invention of the scattergun in the 1890s. Ireland and her fellow hunters ride into the bush atop padded seats on buggies drawn by meticulously matched mules. Trained bird dogs known as "pointers" find and mark the position of the quail on the ground. A dog handler following on horseback flushes the birds into the air for the dismounted hunters. The buggy driver dispatches a retriever to fetch fallen birds, which are stripped of their plumage and later cooked. The quail's tender white meat "is not only a delicacy to man but every predator in the woods," says Lane Green, Tall Timbers' executive director and an avid quail hunter.
Ireland has established herself firmly as the grand dame of the plantation belt -- a stretch of State Road 319, which runs from Tallahassee to Thomasville, is named in her honor -- and entertains a steady flow of family and friends at Foshalee's 76-year-old lodge. To help cover some of the costs of operating the 9,000-acre plantation, Ireland harvests timber from the long-leaf pine that dot her property and plants 200 acres of corn every year to feed the quail. But, with the hunting season in full swing, she focuses resolutely on her twin passions: "Shooting quail is a primary reason for this plantation," Ireland says. "But I also want to conserve this land."