Addressing The Issue
The Town Board Starts Acting To Hold Off The Large Parcel Tax
Increase
By Tree McElhinney
Because the Ulster County Legislature also has the option of
enacting the state large parcel law that the Onteora school
board chose to pass on for this year, the Olive Town Board has
scheduled a special meeting for Thursday, Sept. 11 to discuss
how to address the issue.
“We don’t just want to sit, we have to do something,”
said Town Supervisor Berndt Leifeld during a town board meeting
earlier this month. “The argument is no different
than with the school, except two other towns are involved,”
he said, referring to the Town of Hurley which is home to a
portion of the Ashokan Reservoir, and the town of Warwarsing,
which includes the Roundout Reservior.
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Monumental
Protest
Local Residents Plan A Saturday Civil Disobedience
March Against The City
By Tree McElhinney
A group of Olive residents are organizing a march
across Monument Road this Saturday at noon to protest
the closure of the reservoir thoroughfare, locally
known as the lemon squeeze, by the New York
City Department of Environmental Protection.
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Catskill Park
Changes
The New Park Plan Gets Its Hearings After A Decade Of
Careful Listening
By Paul Smart
The best thing about the new "Draft Plan To Guide
Management of Catskill Park," released by the state
Department of Environmental Conservation in late August
and started on a series of four public hearings Monday
and Tuesday, September 8 and 9, are its factual details.
Turns out the park, scheduled to celebrate its centennial
next year, comprises 705,500 acres, 1,102 square miles,
of which 287,514 acres, or 41 percent, is state-owned,
379,465 acres, or 54 percent, is privately owned, and
a mere 38,521 acres, or 5 percent, is owned by New York
City as its watershed. And of the total publicly owned
lands, over 165,000 acres, or almost 60 percent, is
in Ulster County. 34,000 acres have been designated
as wilderness, where no man-made anything is allowed.
66,000 acres are in wild forests, including a large
patch up on Overlook Mountain, another outsidePhoenicia.
Nearly half the total acreage is for intensive use purposes,
and the entire park draws approximately 553,000 visitors
a year.
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Mike Grehl
For Love Of Crows
Markus Heidelberg’s Poetic Obsession
By Annie Nocenti
Markus Heidelberg was called, quite literally, to his interest
in crows, chosen by the bird itself. He was teaching at Onteora
High when a crow tapped on the classroom window. He opened
the window and in it flew. This crow had an obsession: one
of the girls in the class. The crow would follow the girl’s
school bus to school and back every day. One day, the crow
flew into the classroom and stole a student’s lunch
money. Markus was stunned and charmed. “This was something
I want to know more about. I became obsessedat that point.”
And so began his 30-year relationship with crows; he’s
befriended, painted, filmed and studied them.
One day Markus found two baby crows, made a nest of sticks
and leaves, and raised them. He weighed them twice a day,
feeding them the highest quality dog food. “They’re
omnivores. I’d put the food on my finger and they would
suck my finger down their throat,” he laughs. Why dog
food? “I had taken a course at college, in New Paltz,
in ornithology, with Heinz Meng. So I remembered some things
from his class. He was inspirational. I’d bring Meng
road kill so he could stuff them. It was a very important
class for me.” On the wall in Markus’s home is
an original Meng drawing, of, naturally, crows. When one of
his new pets had a strange growth, the vet Markus brought
the bird to treated it for free, just for the chance to examine
a crow. “I’d read Conrad Lorenz, who wrote about
his geese following him around,” Markus recalls, “so
I knew the crows would assimilate on me. And I wanted them
to.”
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