Greensboro man is candidate for national conservation award

Eddie Bridges of Greensboro is in the running for a national outdoor magazine’s top conservation award, having been named one of six finalists in Field & Stream’s 2012 “Heroes of Conservation” competition.

“I didn’t know anything about this until February when somebody told me I was in a story in the magazine,” said Bridges, 75, executive director of the North Carolina Wildlife Habitat Foundation, a tax-exempt organization that has no paid employees and does its work entirely through donations and with the help of volunteers.

A film crew and magazine officials are coming to Greensboro May 28-29 to visit NCWHF headquarters at Greensboro’s Bur-Mill Park. Later, the crew will film as Bridges takes them on a tour of Caswell County farms that have agreed to become part of the NCWHF’s Quail Habitat Fund restoration project.

‘My understanding is the magazine will have all six finalists come to Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, for the final awards presentation,” said Bridges, who already has been awarded $5,500 from the magazine, an amount that has been deposited into the NCWHF account.

“The national Hero of Conservation winner will win a Toyota truck and cash that amounts to $40,000, I’ve been told, “ Bridges said. “If I’m lucky, I plan to donate that prize to the Habitat Foundation.”

Bridges has previously earned three national conservation awards, the Feinstone Environmental (1991), Chevron (2000) and Anheuser-Busch’s Conservationist of the Year (2004) award. The Busch award came with a $50,000 cash prize that Bridges plowed back into the Habitat Foundation’s “Adopt-An-Acre” program, a concept he developed where the NCWHF seeks matching-funds donors to purchase land to save and enhance wildlife habitat.

When Bridges was District 5 commissioner on the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commissioner for 12 years during the 1970s and 1980s, he created the Wildlife Endowment Fund, which has climbed to nearly $87 million from the purchases of lifetime hunting, fishing and sportsman’s licenses. Only interest generated by this fund may be spent by the agency. The NCWHF’s Habitat Fund is modeled on the Endowment Fund and currently has $5 million. The fund has spent $1 million on habitat since 1994, when the NCWHF was created.