Preserves

Sterling Forest, the 15,000-acre state park across the river in Orange and Rockland counties, turns 10 years old this fall, and a celebration is planned for Sunday.

You don't have to live in Lewisboro to be part of Vi Patek's Lewisboro Land Trust walking group. Vi leads walks through preserves in town throughout the year. The next on is Saturday, July 26, at 9 a.m., at the Old Field Preserve, on Mead Street, Waccabuc.

Our favorite secret natural area is an eight- or 10-acre fen at the bottom of a basin of hills covered with oaks, hickories and red cedars.

The Pound Ridge Land Conservancy, with whom we have worked closely over the past six or seven years, is having an open house on Sunday, June 8, from 2 to 4 p.m., to mark the opening of its new house, at the Armstrong Preserve on Route 121, just north of the Cross River Reservoir causeway.

Westchester Wilderness Walk, our 150-acre preserve in Pound Ridge, is featured in a new book called 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: New York City (2nd edition), by Christopher and Catherine Brooks.

Damon Oscarson and Bill Kuebler of Westchester Land Trust's land preservation staff, and John Schroeder of the Yorktown Land Trust, organized a cleanup detail at the Danner Family Preserve in Yorktown on Saturday morning.

We're formally opening our newest preserve -- the Danner Family Preserve, spanning the Yorktown-Putnam Valley border -- at 11 a.m. on Thursday, May 22. The preserve is on Indian Hill Road, just north of the Jefferson Valley Mall, in Yorktown (although the entrance is across the town line, in Putnam Valley), and anyone who would like to drop by for the opening is welcome.

It's a fascinating preserve -- more than half of its 28 acres is relatively flat, and thick with shrubs and small trees, some native, others invasive. We went there for a quick visit this morning and without even really trying heard 18 species of birds singing, including red-breasted grosbeak, ovenbird, black-and-white warbler, common yellowthroat and wood thrush. The air was redolent with the scent of blooming flowers.