An American gambler spent $90 million buying 54,000 acres of logged Florida land; 8 million longleaf pines later, a lost forest is returning

M.C. Davis spent his teenage years and most of his 20s making a living in card rooms across Florida. He moved on to something more permanent. Most people who make that kind of money buy boats or beach houses. Davis instead bought 54,000 acres of exhausted farmland and heavily logged pine forest in the Florida Panhandle, spending an estimated $90 million restoring it into a forest that had nearly vanished from the American landscape. The wording about the location is repetitive and slightly clunky. It became his life's work.

According to this NPR interview with Davis, recorded a few months before he died in 2015, the land he bought totaled 54,000 acres, and he had already spent years turning worn-out farmland back into a working longleaf pine forest by the time the interview took place.

Why did the longleaf pine forest almost disappear
The longleaf pine forest was once the signature ecosystem of the American South. According to the U.S. Forest Service, it stretched across roughly 90 million acres, running from Virginia down through Florida and over to Texas. Logging, agricultural expansion, and decades of suppressing naturally occurring fires wiped out almost all of it. According to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the ecosystem's range shrank by almost 97 percent, leaving only a few million acres of longleaf forest across its historic range.


Few ecosystems in North America have declined so sharply. Many people have never heard of it because the loss unfolded quietly over more than a century, largely on private land that was not closely tracked.

Why did M.C. Davis focus on black bears
Davis's own turning point came almost by accident, stuck in traffic near Tampa. He wandered into a black bear seminar at a nearby high school, got hooked, and asked the speakers for a reading list. A year of reading Thoreau, John Muir, and E.O. Wilson later, he started buying land.

His reasoning was straightforward. Florida black bears require large, connected habitats to survive, so protecting enough land for bears also protects habitat for many other species along the way. Biologists call this an umbrella species strategy. Starting in 2000, Davis bought degraded peanut farms and low-value pulpwood plantations in Walton County, eventually assembling the full 54,000 acres. He named the property Nokuse, the Muscogee word for black bear.

How the forest is being rebuilt
When Davis bought the land, very few longleaf pines were still standing. His team started over by clearing fast-growing pulpwood pines, planting millions of longleaf seedlings, and reintroducing prescribed fire after half a century without it. The sentence is slightly awkward and could be tightened. Without fire, the whole system breaks down.

Over time, Davis and his crew planted around eight million longleaf seedlings across the property. Nokuse describes itself as the largest privately owned nature preserve in the southeastern United States. It borders Eglin Air Force Base, whose roughly 464,000 acres include one of the region’s largest remaining blocks of longleaf pine habitat. Connecting the two properties allows wildlife to move between them instead of becoming isolated in separate patches.

Is the Nokuse Preserve restoration working
Davis used to joke that he was in 'year thirteen of a 300-year program.' Because longleaf forests take centuries to mature, results come slowly. Still, early signs point to progress. Black bears have recolonized parts of the preserve from neighboring habitat at Eglin Air Force Base.

Habitat restoration is also helping species closely tied to longleaf forests. In October 2024, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird once down to fewer than 10,000 individuals, was reclassified from endangered to threatened after decades of recovery efforts, with the agency citing sustained habitat restoration as a major factor.

Why should you care about a forest you may never visit
Davis died in 2015, but Nokuse continued after his death. The land is permanently protected and supported by a nonprofit created to carry out his vision, even though no one alive today will see it finished.

Davis knew he would never see the forest fully mature. Even so, he invested in a restoration project measured in centuries, not years. More than a decade after his death, the seedlings he planted continue to grow, one longleaf at a time.