Yay Huyck Preserve!

Neat things about the Huyck Preserve I have discovered so far…

1. We’re written into the book Far Side of the Mountain! In fact, the town is the setting for a Major Plot Twist, they camp out under our waterfall, and the Peregrine falcon Frightful is set free on the Preserve. Neat, eh? The author is a local, so there’s actually tons of shout outs in the book.

2. Next neatest fact (in my opinion). The preserve was started in 1931 by a woman named Jessie Eliza Van Antwerp Huyck (who was apparently both very shy and extremely influential) to “be a bird and wildlife sanctuary” serving “to increase the general knowledge and love of nature, especially that of trees and wild life”. She named the preserve after her husband, and got the people of Rennselaeville actively involved from the beginning (they still are, as my observations of the number of townsfolk in and out of the office can attest). Oh, and she required that the preserve dedicate a big part of its mission to education. You go, Jessie, you go. Particularly since your dad wouldn’t let you seek formal education past the high school level (and now all of the preserve’s science staff are female. Hah!).

3. There’s a rural legend that the last ever real live Passenger Pigeon was sighted on the preserve.

4. We run a program called COM.EN.ART. that brings in artists to the preserve for a few weeks to just… create… draw, paint, sketch, whatever. So we’ve got a whole reservoir of art made at the preserve, and all the illustrations on our materials are hand drawn by professionals specifically for the preserve. It’s nifty.

5.The preserve has a huge diversity of habitats- partly because of our location between the deciduous biome and coniferous biome, partially because of the geography (being in the rollicking foothills with a ton of water from various sources)…and partly because when they reforested the land upon making it a preserve they created some unfortunate forestry experiments. So there are funky patches of white spruce and hemlock (which is at least native) and larch and such. One of my goals during my time here is to actually visit all of the different habitats.