By ED KANZE
Oaks, hickories, wild turkeys, eastern bluebirds, southern flying squirrels and black rat snakes: these are some of my favorite things, remembered with delight from the years I spent living and working as a naturalist in northern Westchester County. I know them, too, from visits back to old haunts during the quarter century I’ve lived in the Adirondacks. For more than three decades, I had the pleasure of writing about flora and fauna for various newspapers including the late, great Record-Review. Now, thanks to the kind interest of a newly assembled brain trust, I will have the pleasure of contributing nature pieces to The Recorder.
A fine place to start seems to be with comparisons between the northern Westchester wilds as I knew them in the 1980s, and the northern Westchester of today.
Consider the black bear. When I served as curator of the Trailside Nature Museum of the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation from 1984 to 1989, the idea of black bears returning to live and raise cubs in local woods would have seemed preposterous. Yet here they are. Ursus americanus has come roaring back, literally sometimes, and we must do our best to adapt. It seems only fair to welcome the bear in our midst. After all, while humans have prowled this landscape only since the waning days of the last Ice Age, black bears surely have Westchester roots that go much deeper.
Let’s ponder other encore acts. When I worked at the Reservation, the sighting of a raven would have been a huge deal and maybe front-page news. Now the big, black, feathered Einsteins are seen routinely. Wild turkeys have also made an astonishing comeback. I remember the first turkey regularly seen in northern Westchester. She was known to local birdwatchers as the “Virgin Mary” because she filled her nests with infertile eggs. An absence of males, of toms, was presumed until, in the Reservation around 1985 if memory serves correctly, a hen hatched the first clutch of homegrown turkey eggs in a century or two.
When I lived and worked in the Reservation, Carolina wrens, red-bellied woodpeckers and turkey vultures were still fresh arrivals. The tufted titmouse, so common today, was fairly new in the neighborhood, too. I remember a day when a dear friend from those days, the late Tom Meyer, burst into the Trailside Museum with news that he had spied a black vulture circling in park airspace. I ran out and saw it, too. If I recall correctly, that was the first black vulture recorded in New York. Today, seeing one is no big deal. The same is true for bald eagles. They’re back in a big way thanks to a wildly successful reintroduction program organized by Peter Nye at New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation and underwritten by New York state taxpayers.
Coyotes are often thought of as new arrivals, but they’ve been around a while. They inhabited woods near White Plains when I roamed them in the 1960s, and reports of them in the northern part of the county go back to the 1950s. Just about every night program during my time at the Reservation was accompanied by background music, the best of it provided by coyote families, moms and offspring bonding as Julie Andrews and her charges did in “The Sound of Music.” Bobcats were also present, although perhaps seen less often than today.
Invasive plants and insects arrived in the intervening years, too. I think of the hemlock woolly adelgid, the emerald ash borer, the spotted lanternfly, mile-a-minute vine, porcelain-berry and more.
Losses? Alas, there have been many. The first that comes to mind is ice. An avid ice fisherman in my Westchester days, we used to enjoy three months or more of hardwater fishing on ponds and big reservoirs such as Cross River, Muscoot and Croton Falls. Ice fishing on these waters is now a faint memory, I’m told.
A common bird in Westchester woods in those days was the ruffed grouse. When leading a bird walk at Pound Ridge a few years ago, a skilled birder in my group who seemed to know his warblers from his vireos told me that the grouse had vanished entirely. I find this astonishing and terribly sad. It also might not be entirely true. Either way, I have vivid grouse memories, of peaceful times that were turned, at least momentarily, into bursts of terror as a female grouse charged me with Elizabethan ruffs and crests erected and wings beating furiously. It always took a moment to realize the hullabaloo was harmless, merely the effort of a mother grouse to drive a prospective predator away from her offspring.
The bird long known as the rufous-sided towhee, now labeled eastern towhee in bird books, has, I’m told, undergone a steep decline, too. The forest floor I knew in my Westchester childhood, the habitat in which towhees kick up insects and spiders and snails, is unrecognizable to me in most places. Gone or largely gone are young native trees, most native shrubs, and a host of wildflowers. In their places flourish invasive wildflowers such as garlic mustard, exotic shrubs such as winged burning-bush and Japanese barberry, and soil that teems with leaf-gobbling earthworms introduced from Europe and Asia.
While not all changes are happy ones, let us not be discouraged. Conservation efforts are robust and involve more dedicated people than I could have imagined back when. And we have much to celebrate and enjoy. By celebrating and enjoying it and keeping our spirits up, we can find the resolve and energy to make positive change and breathe new life into old haunts.
It’s great to be back. Join me in supporting this newspaper, either in print or online, and finding joy and interest in wild things.
Ed Kanze is a Westchester-born author, naturalist and licensed guide who lives in the Adirondack Mountains. His latest book, “The Nature of the Place,” will be published in March, 2025.