Hudson Valley

Spotted lanternflies are in their adult stage now along the river towns, from Kingston and Port Ewen up through Saugerties, across the river in Red Hook, Rhinebeck and Tivoli, and up into the Catskills at Palenville and Woodstock. The adult (Lycorma delicatula) is about an inch long with gray forewings speckled black. When it jumps, the hindwings flash red with black spots and a white band. Most people meet it first on a house wall, a car door, or the trunk of a tree-of-heaven along a road.Spotted lanternflies follow a set life cycle in general: eggs hatch in spring, nymphs pass through four stages (black with white spots, then red), and adults typically emerge by mid-summer, with mating beginning in late summer. That puts the population here now in the egg-laying phase, which runs from now until the first killing freeze, likely mid-to-late October in this area. Each female lays one or two masses of 30 to 60 eggs and coats them in a putty-like layer that starts creamy white, dries to pinkish gray, then darkens and cracks until it looks like a smear of dried mud. On a tree, most masses end up ten feet or more above the ground. But they go on almost any smooth surface: rock, a fence post, split firewood, the side of a trailer.That last habit is how the insect travels. Adults are poor fliers. They walk and jump and cover a few miles at most in a lifetime. The long moves happen when egg masses ride on vehicles and firewood, and the places they are turning up this month fit that: riverfront streets, road corridors, a fairgrounds, a college campus, rather than deep forest.Both nymphs and adults feed by piercing bark with needle-like stylets and drawing sap from the phloem, the inner bark. Tree-of-heaven, itself an introduced tree from the same part of Asia, is the host on which they survive best and lay the most eggs, and it is thick in Kingston, where it was recorded again this week. Where dozens crowd one trunk, the bark weeps sap and the insects rain sugary honeydew onto everything below. The honeydew grows a black sooty mold and draws yellowjackets and ants. Trees rarely die from the feeding; they are stressed by it. Grapevines are the exception. Heavy feeding can cut yields drastically and kill vines outright. Wild riverbank, summer and fox grapes were all logged around Red Hook and Rhinebeck in the past two weeks, and the valley's vineyards are the one crop with real losses on the line.Native animals have started eating them. Cardinals, catbirds, blue jays and tufted titmice all take adults, as do praying mantids, wheel bugs, orbweaver spiders and spined soldier bugs. None of these predators came over with the insect. Researchers have also proposed that lanternflies feeding on tree-of-heaven may store its bitter compounds, potentially making them less palatable to some predators — a hypothesis still being tested, not a confirmed effect on their numbers.Dutchess and Ulster are both counties where the state considers the insect established. The DEC's ask is plain: kill adults on sight, scrape egg masses into a bucket of hot soapy water or a bag of hand sanitizer, and check vehicles, firewood and outdoor gear before moving them, especially when leaving an area where lanternflies are thick. Reports of specific locations are still welcome through iMapInvasives. From here until the first hard frost is the window when scraping an egg mass removes up to sixty of next year's nymphs at once.

A Connecticut Warbler (Oporornis agilis) turned up on September 11 on a restricted-access property along Posquiello Creekside Road, a single bird working the ground cover. It is one of the least-seen warblers in the East. Most birders who have one on their list found it this way, on a fall stopover in the Northeast, and never on its breeding grounds in the tamarack and spruce bogs and jack pine stands of the boreal forest.It is a plump, short-tailed warbler with a gray hood, an olive back and a yellow belly. The mark that catches the eye first is the eye-ring: complete, white and bold. The legs are long and pink, the bill is heavy and spike-like, and the feathers under the tail run nearly to its tip. Mourning Warbler is the lookalike. It is slimmer, its eye-ring is broken or missing, and a male in spring carries black on the breast where the Connecticut is plain gray. Nashville Warbler has a similar eye-ring but a yellow throat, is much smaller, and feeds up in the trees.The surest tell is how it moves. A Connecticut Warbler walks. It paces slowly along the ground or a low branch, bobbing its short tail, and flips dead leaves to get at the insects underneath, the way an Ovenbird does. Nearly every other warbler hops. On stopover it keeps to the bottom of the understory: weedy field edges against woods, thickets, tangles of goldenrod and jewelweed. Whoever is looking for one is looking at the ground, not the canopy, and usually waiting a long time.The bird's migration runs in a loop. In spring it comes north through the middle of the continent. In fall it swings east to southern New England and the Atlantic coast, and from there it flies out over open ocean. In 2017, researchers fitted geolocators to birds breeding in Manitoba and later recovered four of them. The tracks they read showed roughly 48 hours nonstop over the Atlantic, some 1,700 to 2,400 kilometers, to Cuba or Hispaniola. The birds then spent about a week on the ground there. From there they crossed another 800 kilometers of water to Venezuela and continued on to wintering grounds in the Amazon basin. The bulk of the species passes through the Northeast in the second half of September. A bird on the Hudson on the 11th is on the early side of that window, feeding in the leaf litter before the long overwater leg.

The Village of Tivoli's wastewater treatment plant on the Hudson has now exceeded its permitted ammonia discharge limit for three consecutive quarterly reporting periods, and remains in significant non-compliance today. The violation was severe last December, when total ammonia nitrogen at the discharge point ran more than twelve times the permitted monthly average. That spike has eased considerably since, but the most recent reading, taken August 14, still came in 46% over the limit.Ammonia is toxic to fish and other aquatic life, and that toxicity worsens as water warms and as pH rises, which is exactly the direction conditions push in mid-August. This is a permit exceedance on record, not a confirmed fish kill or oxygen crash in the river itself; establishing that would take separate monitoring of the receiving water.Still, a facility recording its third straight quarter over limit, with the exceedance still running high in the same month that stresses aquatic life most, is a trend worth watching rather than a problem to consider resolved.

Cicada-killer wasps (Sphecius species) are out along Broadway — two sightings at the same spot on July 25 almost certainly mark a nesting aggregation on a sunny patch of disturbed ground nearby. These are among the largest wasps in the northeast, females reaching nearly two inches, and their late-July appearance is one of the valley's most reliable seasonal markers. They emerge precisely when annual cicadas hit peak numbers, provision underground burrow cells with a single paralyzed cicada per egg, and are gone by August.Despite their size they are solitary, with no colony to defend, and the males — which hover and bluff around burrow sites — cannot even sting. Their fondness for dry, compacted, sun-exposed soils means roadsides and sandy banks have become prime nesting habitat, which is partly why encounters like this one are easy to come by in late summer.

Streamflow has dropped to drought levels—only seven cubic feet per second now—yet the water temperature has fallen sharply to 17°C, down from a trout-stressing 22°C just two weeks ago. The shift marks a critical transition: groundwater has become the stream's primary source, replacing the warm, depleted surface runoff of midsummer.That groundwater buffer is real and ecologically precious, but it comes with a hidden cost. Slow, shallow water offers little dilution capacity for any upstream discharge—whether agricultural runoff, septic seepage, or industrial effluent. Every pollutant that enters the system now concentrates with minimal mixing, making this is the moment when stream chemistry becomes a live concern.

Nearly half the permitted industrial and municipal dischargers in the watershed upstream are in significant violation of the Clean Water Act. Of approximately 230 facilities holding active permits within 50 kilometers, 108 recorded violations over the past four quarters—12 in significant non-compliance and 20 under formal enforcement action. Penalties assessed totaled just over $133,000.The irony is sharp: the legal architecture protecting these streams was partly built by organizing movements born in this very valley, decades ago. The framework has held; the compliance has not. When permits exist but go unenforced at scale, when violations stack up and penalties barely reflect the cost of noncompliance, the law becomes a form without substance—a signal of what ought to happen rather than what does.

The creek bounced back dramatically this week—streamflow jumped tenfold from last week's drought low—but the rebound masks a serious problem. Water temperature has climbed to 22.4°C, warm enough to stress brook trout beyond their comfort zone. Fuller water and healthier water are not the same thing.This kind of rapid warming often tracks with runoff from sun-baked surfaces, and it arrives at a moment when the stream is already listed as impaired under state water quality standards. The wastewater treatment plant upstream continues to discharge ammonia above its permitted level, though the violation has improved from last quarter's twelve-fold exceedance to roughly 60% over limit. Incremental progress, but not yet compliance—and the creek's margin for stress is already thin.

Stream flow has collapsed to 4.5 cubic feet per second—roughly one-tenth of the two-week average—and in that sluggish water, the creek's ability to dilute and process inputs has evaporated. Temperatures have climbed to 21.6°C, warm enough to trigger the neurological effects ammonia exerts on fish and invertebrates.The wastewater treatment plant upstream has overshot its ammonia discharge limit in two consecutive quarters now—more than twelve times the permitted level last fall, then 61 percent over in spring. Low-flow conditions mean that excess ammonia is now moving through a system with virtually no ability to break it down before it reaches sensitive habitat downstream. The window between what this stream can tolerate and what it is receiving has all but closed.

Spotted Lanternflies (Lycorma delicatula) have now colonized interior forest habitat within the Catskills — a troubling sign that the invasion has moved well beyond the valley floors where it first took hold. A research-grade sighting in early June confirms the front is advancing upslope, with over 200 confirmed records in the past year across a 25-kilometer radius spanning from Kingston through Saugerties and into Woodstock.The timing is critical. Sugar maples are now bearing ripe fruits, opening what entomologists call the secondary host window—the period when nymphs most aggressively disperse from their primary host, tree-of-heaven, to colonize new trees. This window of peak mobility combined with the lanternfly's established presence in the interior forest means the next few weeks will be decisive for how far upslope this pest spreads through the park.

The common milkweed along roadsides and field edges near Kingston is in flower right now. The blooms come in dense, rounded clusters, pale pink to dusty rose, and they smell strongly sweet in the heat of the day. If you find a patch, look down at the leaves before you look up at the flowers. On the broad, rubbery leaves, you may find monarch caterpillars feeding. They are banded in yellow, white, and black, and they eat with their heads down, working steadily through the leaf tissue from the edge inward.The monarch's relationship with common milkweed is one of near-total dependence. Adult monarchs lay their eggs almost exclusively on milkweed plants, and the caterpillars eat nothing else. The plant produces a sticky white latex sap loaded with cardenolides, a class of compounds toxic enough to disrupt heart function in most vertebrates. The caterpillar takes those compounds in as it feeds and stores them in its own tissues. By the time it pupates, a monarch is chemically defended against most birds. A blue jay that eats a monarch caterpillar or butterfly typically vomits within minutes. After that, it avoids the banded pattern. The milkweed's defense, which evolved to deter feeding, becomes the caterpillar's protection.The timing of egg-laying tracks the milkweed closely. Female monarchs arriving in the Kingston area in late spring and early summer are looking for young, actively growing milkweed plants. The younger leaves are easier to chew and carry higher concentrations of water and nitrogen, both of which the caterpillar needs to grow. A monarch caterpillar increases its body mass roughly two thousandfold between hatching and pupation, and it does that in about two weeks. You can sometimes find a caterpillar that has nearly defoliated a single stem, the remaining leaf stubs chewed to their midribs, while the caterpillar hangs at the tip still eating. When a stem is stripped, the caterpillar drops and walks to the next plant. Watch the ground around a milkweed patch and you may see one moving through the grass.Common milkweed is doing something else in early summer besides feeding caterpillars. The flower clusters are producing nectar in quantity, and the blooms draw a wide range of insects: bumblebees, honeybees, various wasps, and other butterflies including the eastern black swallowtail, which is flying in the Kingston area now. The milkweed's flower structure traps visiting insects momentarily by the leg, transferring pollen sacs that the insect carries to the next flower. It is an unusually mechanical pollination system, and it occasionally holds a small bee long enough to exhaust and kill it. The plant is not passive.Monarchs are listed as threatened, and the pressures on them are well documented: the loss of milkweed from agricultural fields following the widespread adoption of herbicide-resistant crops, the reduction of overwintering habitat in Mexican mountain forests, and the fragmentation of the grassland and old-field habitats where milkweed grows. Common milkweed is a plant of disturbed, open ground. It thrives in the kinds of places that tend to get mowed, paved, or treated: roadsides, utility corridors, fallow fields, garden edges. Milkweed patches near Kingston that persist through the summer without being cut give monarchs a place to complete their cycle. A single patch of a dozen plants can support multiple caterpillars through to pupation.The invasive spotted knapweed is also present in open areas around Kingston, and it competes directly with milkweed for space in the disturbed-ground habitats both species favor. Knapweed establishes densely and can displace native forbs over several seasons. It is worth knowing what it looks like: a branching plant with narrow, grayish-green leaves and small thistle-like purple flowers later in summer. Where it crowds out milkweed, the monarchs lose footing.Right now, in the warmest part of the day, the milkweed flowers are releasing their scent most strongly. Stand near a patch and you can smell it before you see it. The leaves are broad and slightly waxy, and if you look at the underside of one, you might find a pale monarch egg, about the size of a pinhead, glued to the surface. Or you might find a caterpillar already there, working through the green.