Above: A view of New York City's Cannonsville Reservoir in late spring. Photo by Flickr user kmitschke; published under Creative Commons license.
A sound that won't be heard on most of New York City's reservoirs this summer: The whir of electric trolling motors.
At Windham Mountain, even the slopes were clad in St. Patrick's Day green over the weekend. There was plenty of snow on Saturday for Windham's "Irish I Was Skiing/Riding Festival," which featured live music and a skiing leprechaun.
Pictured above: Johan Hedlund, Peter Jenko, Michael Gallo and Stephen Brown of the Windham Mountain Ski Patrol. Photo from Windham Mountain's Facebook page.
Illustration by Flickr user Adreson Vita Sá; published under Creative Commons license.
Our Catskills Food Guide editor Jennifer Strom photographed this turkey making like a chickadee at a bird feeder in Roxbury today. After the cold, hard winter we've had, wildlife is especially stressed.
It's not just in the Catskills where animals are hungry. "Tough New York City birds" are having an equally rough time, according to the New York Daily News:
“It has been crazy,” said Cathy Horvath, who volunteers with Wildlife in Need of Rescue and Rehabilitation. “We’re getting calls about swans coming up to people begging for food and ducks crashing into pavement thinking it was water.”
Folks upstate have noticed similar behavior, according to a story in the Ithaca Journal:
A raccoon that attacked a dog in the Delaware County village of Stamford has tested positive for rabies, county health officials announced Thursday.
It is the first animal in the county to be found with rabies in 2014. No rabid animals were found in Delaware County in 2013, according to county health educator Heather Warner.
The raccoon was captured and killed, and sent to the state rabies laboratory for testing. On Thursday, March 13, the laboratory reported that the animal had tested positive for rabies.
According to a press release from Delaware County Public Health Services, the dog's owner said that the attack occurred during the day, which is unusual behavior for healthy raccoons.
Above: Alan Via and Bookah on the trail. Photo by Joanne Hihn, who also took the photos used in the Times Union's story; reproduced by permission.
In her nine brief years on the planet, the four-legged Bookah racked up more hiking experience than most humans. With her owner, author and well-known local outdoorsman Alan Via, Bookah scaled all 35 of the Catskills' tallest peaks, earning the chocolate lab her own 3500 Club certificate.
But Bookah's mountaineering skills couldn't save her from a fate every dog owner dreads. While on a hike with Via in a remote and trailless area in the southwestern Catskills, Bookah ate a piece of meat that had been laced with the fast-acting poison strychnine, and died before Via could get her out of the woods.
Above: A man and his evaporator: Mike Porter in his Margaretville sugar house. Photo courtesy of the Catskill Forest Association.
Warm during the day, and below freezing at night: It's the beginning of maple syrup season. Maple producers across the Catskills have spent the past few months laboriously tapping maple trees, and now it's time to gather the sap and boil it down to make syrup.
It takes anywhere from 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of maple syrup, so producers are about to spend the rest of the month next to their evaporators.
The season gets into full swing on March 22 when producers across the state open their sugar houses during Maple Weekend. (Stay tuned for our guide to maple weekend, coming out next week.)
But if you're desperate for a taste of the sweet stuff early, you can get a sneak preview of a working sugar house at a Catskill Forest Association workshop in Margaretville this Saturday.
An artist's rendering of the Adelaar in winter. Source: AdelaarNY.com.
Developers unveiled plans today for a massive 1,700-acre casino and resort on the grounds of the Concord resort in Monticello. Backers of the $750 million project are betting on securing one of New York State's four casino licenses from the state Gaming Commission.
Dubbed the Adelaar -- Dutch for "eagle" -- the resort plans feature five hotels with 1,100 rooms, an indoor waterpark, an 18-hole golf course, an "entertainment village" with a movie theatre and shopping outlets, ziplines, a mountain coaster, and acres of trails and areas for hiking, boating, skiing, fishing and other outdoor recreation, according to a press release issued Thursday by developers EPR Properties and Empire Resorts.
The Times Herald-Record's Steve Israel is calling the project "the most spectacular development Sullivan County -- and perhaps the region -- has ever seen."
Who says cats don't like leashes?
Submissions to our 2014 Catskills Outdoor Guide photo contest are rolling in. We really enjoyed this one, taken by Abby Dousset on the Saugerties Lighthouse Trail.
Enter your photo in the contest. As always, the Peekamoose Restaurant & Tap Room is offering a dinner for two as the grand prize. Info and guidlines are here. To see all the phtos submitted so far, check out the slideshow below, or head to our Facebook page, where we're posting all entries.
Above: Looking Glass Pond in Fulton, where two of a statewide list of 50 proposed projects to increase access to outdoor recreation are located. Photo by Flickr user Doug Kerr; published under Creative Commons license.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently proposed 50 new outdoor recreation projects around New York State, which if adopted would add up to a roughly $6 million investment in new trails, access points and other projects aimed at outdoor tourism. The projects would open up 380,000 acres of state land to new access for hikers, hunters, anglers and boaters.
