What the stories of your Wonderkeepers can look like

Two complete  stories – written to demonstrate the craft, the psychology, and the fundraising power that goes into every story I produce.

A note about these samples –

The featured Wonderkeepers and organizations in these stories are fictitious – created specifically to demonstrate my approach without compromising the privacy of real donors or real organizations.

What isn’t fictitious: the craft, the psychology, and the structure behind every word.

The light came low across the water in the early morning — just enough to catch the edges of wings before the birds settled into the reeds.

“Conk-la-ree.” The greeting of a red-winged blackbird. A blue heron squawked. Cicadas buzzed in the trees. An alligator left a wake as it moved silently across the water. Blaize Thompkins learned to be still in those moments.

Surrounded by sea grapes, maritime hammock vegetation, and mangroves, this place of serene beauty.

On her first morning birding adventures – as a young girl – her father would stand a few steps behind her, whispering names she would come to know by heart — egret, heron, white ibis — until a marsh or wooded area began to feel like something she could read.

What began as something she did with her father gradually became something she carried on her own. Even as her life moved in other directions — education, career, responsibility — the habit of noticing never left her.

Blaize purchased a professional camera setup and taught herself to be a wildlife photographer. Her images appeared in numerous conservation publications. Eventually, she published her own photo book and has enjoyed teaching others the secrets of nature photography.

There was one place she returned to more than any other:  The Canaveral National Seashore corridor — miles of undeveloped Atlantic coastline, tidal lagoon, and scrub flatwood, quietly stewarded over the years against the slow pressure of development on every side. She was surprised that it wasn’t like any other coastal area she knew. It didn’t feel like any other stretch of Florida coast. “I remember thinking — this is what nature is supposed to look like,” she says.

There were other visitors to notice: manatees and dolphins. And leatherback, loggerhead, and green sea turtles would lay their eggs on the beach under night skies.

One day, a “birding” friend of hers invited Blaize to a Southeastern Coastal Wetlands gathering in Orlando.

Something about the organization’s work felt familiar to her that night. Not the facts or the figures, but the underlying instinct — that these places deserved to be protected not because they were useful, but because they were irreplaceable. She came back. First as a project volunteer, then as a member of the events committee.

“I’m not leaving them money. I’m leaving them time, time to preserve coastline habitats for generations to come.”

She began to think about time differently — not in terms of years, but in terms of continuity. What remains. What disappears. And what is carried forward.

“At some point you stop thinking about your life in years and start thinking about it in what might continue afterwards.”

The idea did not arrive all at once. It emerged slowly, almost the way the birds did — something you begin to notice only after you’ve been still long enough.She found herself returning to a question she couldn’t quite set aside. “I kept thinking — this place gave me something. A way of seeing, really. And I thought, what do I owe it?”

Not as an obligation. As a continuation.

Through a legacy commitment to Southeastern Coastal Wetlands, she arranged for her support to extend beyond her lifetime — helping to protect the coastal corridor she had returned to for so many years.

For Blaize, it was about knowing that long after she was gone, the light would still move across the water in the early morning… and someone else might be standing there, just beginning to see.

People who love these places the way Blaize does often find that a legacy gift is simply the most natural extension of a life already devoted to them.

Blaize says, “I worked with Southeastern Coastal Wetlands for years. I came to love and trust this organization and its stewardship of wildlife habitats.”

To learn how a legacy gift might fit into your own plans, contact us at [email].

The smell reaches you before anything else — low tide and pluff mud and something older than either, the mineral exhale of a marsh that has been doing this for ten thousand years. Then the sound: red-winged blackbirds stitching the air together, the soft percussion of water against cordgrass, and somewhere in the hollow of a cypress snag, the scratching of small claws.

The wood duck does not announce herself. She simply appears — burnished chestnut at the cavity entrance, head angled, watching. The marsh holds its breath.

Henry and Evelyn McMasters have been coming to this same bend in the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge nearly every Friday afternoon for eleven years. Not because they have to. Because something in this landscape keeps calling them back — keeps insisting they pay attention. They are art and design professors, yes, but what defines them more truly is this: they are people who have trained themselves, over decades, to see what is actually there.

Henry carries a worn pair of binoculars he’s had since graduate school. Evelyn keeps a small watercolor field journal, its pages warped from humidity and use.

“It was a wood duck that stopped us the first time. Just — stopped us cold. She came out of that cavity and the light was doing something extraordinary to the water, and Evelyn grabbed my arm and neither of us said a word for about ten minutes. That’s when I knew this place had gotten into us for good.”

— Henry McMasters

That moment was a seed. Over the years, it grew into something more deliberate — a question the McMasters began asking quietly, then more urgently: What happens to this marsh when we are no longer here to love it?

The section of tidal wetland where they had watched wood ducks nest for a decade was degraded — its hydrology disrupted by an old agricultural berm, its native cordgrass thinning, its cavity trees declining. Without intervention, it faced a slow erasure. The ducks would move on. The marsh would not recover on its own.

The McMasters’ gift to Georgia Marsh Preservation funded the full restoration of 47 acres of that tidal wetland — breaching the berm, replanting 12,000 stems of native Spartina, and installing a network of wood duck nest boxes throughout the restored corridor. What would have been a silted, grass-poor stretch of degraded marsh is now actively used nesting habitat, documented by refuge biologists in each of the two seasons since the project’s completion.

“We’ve spent our whole careers thinking about what we pass on to students — what they’ll carry forward from a semester, from a conversation, from a single drawing exercise. At some point you start thinking in longer timelines. You start asking what you leave behind not just in people, but in the world itself. A marsh restored is — it’s not a monument. It’s more like a promise. That the beauty we found here gets to keep happening.”

— Evelyn McMasters

The McMasters are part of a growing circle of Georgia Marsh Preservation supporters who have chosen to make lasting provisions for the land they love — people who understand that the most durable form of care is not a check written once, but a commitment written into their estate. Georgia Marsh Preservation has stewarded the Savannah coastal corridor for over three decades, working in active partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and coastal conservation researchers at the University of Georgia.

“I want some child — maybe fifty years from now, maybe a hundred — to stand in that marsh on a Friday afternoon and see a wood duck come out of a cavity in the light. And not know our names. And not need to. The experience is the thing. That’s enough.”

— Henry McMasters

That restored marsh is there now, doing its ancient work — filtering tidal water, sheltering broods, exhaling into a Friday afternoon the way it has for ten thousand years.

It will still be there long after all of us.

If you’ve ever wondered how to make your love for this landscape last forever, we’d love to talk.

The marsh will be here Friday afternoon. So will we.

(A gift to Georgia Marsh Preservation from Henry and Evelyn McMasters funded the restoration of 47 acres of tidal wetland in the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge corridor — a habitat now actively used by nesting wood ducks.)