Hudson River Estuary Program
News from the Hudson River Estuary Program

Celebrate Water Week

For 35 years, New York has set aside the first full week in May to focus on its abundant water resources, highlight water issues, and encourage stewardship. This year’s theme is "Five Decades of Water Protection and Restoration" to highlight key milestones in water management since the first Earth Day 50 years ago. During Water Week, DEC's Division of Water will be sending daily special editions of MakingWaves. To receive this informative, online newsletter, go to DEC Delivers. 

The Renewal of Spring

While we're all on pause, one way to connect to the magnificent unfolding of spring is through the weekly nature journal, Hudson River Almanac. The Almanac, compiled by naturalist Tom Lake, captures the river's spirit, magic, and science by presenting observations and photographs from the many individuals who delight in the diversity of nature in the Hudson Valley. This spring will be long remembered as a time when the season provided all of us with a much needed renewal of spirit through nature. The phenology of springtime, the orderly and natural progression leading to winter’s exit, becomes manifest in the fragrance and colors of daffodils, hyacinth, magnolia, forsythia, shadbush, dogwood, lilac, and the magnificent redbud. Coupled with the music of returning songbirds, as well as upstream waves of fish –schools of herring and shad– spring is on display in the air, in the forest, and in the river.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of spring is the creation of new life, new year-classes of wildlife---birds chief among them. The easiest to notice may be the bald eagle, with their huge nests and tiny fuzzy-headed nestlings. Close observation will note daily deliveries of fish from the river, many of them fresh from the sea. In the marshes and wetlands, geese, ducks, and other waterfowl are paired up and incubating. Along the forest edge, songbirds having returned from wintering from as far away as South America, build their nests, lay their eggs, and tend to their nestlings.

Unseen to most of us on land, is an incredible movement in the water. Spring delivers a surge inland from the sea of millions of migratory fishes headed upstream to spawn, often into tributaries reaching half way across New York.

From flowers to birds to fish, to the wonderful greening of the landscape, these changes are all highlighted by the warming and lengthening of the days. Spring carries on as a natural instinctual tradition that began long before any of our species entered the Hudson Valley. These rhythms and rituals of spring, that mean so much this year, are eternal.

The Renewal of Spring was written by Tom Lake with photographs by Deborah Tracy Kraal (bobcats and mergansers) and John Badura (mergansers). Subscribe to the Hudson River Almanac.