News and Views from the Empire State
The Raquette River flows from its source at Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks, to the St. Lawrence River at Akewesasne.
East of Tupper Lake and just north of Simon Pond is a place called “The Cut.”
“The Cut” was channel dug to “straighten the river” so that logs could be floated (driven) straight into Simon Pond, thus avoiding a shallow and meandering section of the Raquette River known as Moody’s Flow. [Read more…] about An Unnatural History of the Raquette River
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has announced that emerald ash borer (EAB) has been confirmed in Warren County.
While not unexpected given the EAB’s spread, this marks the first confirmed case of EAB within the Adirondack Park. The affected trees were identified by Department of Transportation personnel at the Warren County Canoe Launch on the Schroon River in the town of Chester. A sample has been sent to Cornell University Insect Diagnostic Lab for further review. [Read more…] about Invasive Emerald Ash Borer Found in Adirondack Park
To a highly mobile species like humans, the fact that other animals relocate their families – or entire populations – isn’t a big surprise. We know historical migrations have been the norm, though the fossil record shows that generally these changes happened at a snail’s pace.
The “Great American Interchange” in which northern animals spread southward and South American critters expanded north during the Pliocene Epoch, took a million years. Give or take a few, I assume. [Read more…] about Northern Tree Migrations: Nature on the Move
From the afternoon into the early evening in mid to late summer, a silence often develops as the heat of the day peaks and then starts to cool; as birds cease to sing and amphibians lose their urge to call.
In the stillness between periods when leaves rustle from light summer breezes, the sound of a grinding or twisting-scraping can be heard coming from a fallen softwood log or a dead standing evergreen. [Read more…] about The Northeastern Pine Sawyer Beetle
William F. Fox was born in 1840 in Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, and graduated from Union College in Schenectady in 1860. He served in the Civil War as Captain, Major and then Lieutenant Colonel in the 107th New York Volunteers and later wrote a number of books on both the Civil War and forestry.
Fox’s 1902 History of the Lumber Industry in the State of New York, written under the auspicious of Gifford Pinchot, is considered among the first authoritative works on the logging industry in New York. [Read more…] about William Fox Helped Create Modern NYS Forest Rangers