Here’s some fast facts on the proposed Pilgrim Pipeline: It would stretch 178 miles from Albany to Linden, New Jersey, and convey up to 400,000 gallons a day of crude oil, the volatile product of fracked natural gas from the Bakken Shield in North Dakota. Forty-one of those miles would go through Ulster County…
Each spring, Atlantic sturgeon, an ancient fish dating back more than 120 million years to the era of the dinosaurs, swim up the Hudson River to spawn. These ocean-dwelling behemoths, which measure six feet or more at maturity, vacuum up mollusks, crustaceans, plants, and small fish from the river bottom with their snout-like mouths and lay their eggs on the rocky bottom of freshwater stretches above the salt wedge.
Twice a day, two million gallons of crude oil fracked from the Bakken in North Dakota are transported through Saugerties, the Town of Ulster, the city of Kingston, and the Town of Esopus in a 100-car train.
Pollution, overdevelopment, climate change…the list of degradations to the environment is extensive, posing huge challenges. But perhaps the biggest threat in the Hudson Valley is more insidious.
One hot, sunny morning in late June, Amanda Higgs, a fisheries biologist with the New York State Department of Environment Conservation’s (DEC) Hudson River Estuary Program, was fishing for Atlantic sturgeon, the Hudson’s largest and most ancient fish.
Sometime in April, when the little white clusters of Dutchman’s breeches and the aptly named shadbush are in bloom, schools of shad enter the Hudson from the Atlantic Ocean and swim up the river to spawn.