| Fast Facts |
location
80 miles northwest of New York City
ecoregion
High Allegheny Plateau
project size
435 square miles
preserves
Neversink, Bashakill (co-managed with Orange County Land Trust)
public lands
Neversink Unique Area, Catskill Park, Bashakill Wildlife Management Area, Sullivan State Forest
partners
Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Geological Survey, Bashakill Area Association, Trout Unlimited, towns of Thompson and Deerpark, Delaware River Basin Commission, N.Y. Department of Environmental Conservation, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Orange County Land Trust, Orange County, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sullivan County
conservancy initiatives
Freshwater, Fire
natural events
shad run, May/June; one of the largest concentrations of wood ducks on East Coast, fall | |
 | |
 |
The river where American fly fishing was born is today the scene of maverick approaches to managing freshwater ecosystems for both human and ecological needs. |
|
 |
River birch, Neversink River.
© Hardie Truesdale |
|
Beginning high in the Catskill Mountains, the Neversink River— black, cold and clean—courses southward over glacial cobbles and gravelly mussel shoals. Long and narrow, with fewer curves and eddies than other Catskill rivers, it cuts a straight course through forests and the marshy haunts of osprey and dragonflies toward its union with the Delaware River.
The fast, bouldery waters of the Neversink presented a seminal challenge in the late 19th century to American fly fishers like Theodore Gordon, who were applying a British sport to New World waters. Gordon, an upstate New York native, realized the dry flies he tried to use in the Never-sink’s waters imitated English, not American, insects. They also were designed for the smooth currents of English chalk streams, not the swift currents of this wild river. The flies Gordon invented here and the methods he pioneered led to a uniquely American school, and today the Neversink is hailed as the birthplace of American fly fishing. |
Brook Floaters & Dwarf Wedgemussels.
© Hardie Truesdale |
|
Although the river’s gurgling waters are still a mecca for fly fishers from all over the world, many of the pools where Gordon fished were drowned in the 1950s behind the Never-sink Reservoir Dam. Nearly 40 years later, aquatic biologists discovered that this dam and another—the Cuddebackville Dam—were leading to declines in populations of fish like |
| American shad, which could not reach much of their historic spawning grounds. They and other creatures like the dwarf wedgemussel, found nowhere else on Earth, needed natural river flows to survive. | |
|
After more than a decade of working on the Neversink, The Nature Conservancy has reached an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and state and local agencies to remove the Cuddebackville Dam in summer 2003, opening up nearly 30 miles of fish spawning habitat. With more than 80 percent of the river’s flow pumped to New York City (it is considered the metropolis’ purest source of drinking water), we are now working to develop a model for ecologically sustainable water management throughout the Delaware River Basin, one that balances human needs with those of freshwater ecosystems.
Learn more about The Nature Conservancy's work in New York. | |
|
| Conservation Profile |
targets
American shad, American eel, dragon- flies, Bashakill bottomland swamp, brook trout, blue spotted sunfish, freshwater mussels, forests of sycamore, river birch and red maple
stresses
disruption of water-flow patterns, invasive species, pollution, aquatic and terrestrial habitat fragmentation from incompatible development, forestry, mining, dams
strategies
remove dams and other riverine barriers, restore ecosystems, promote ecologically compatible development and land use, acquire land, secure conservation easements
results
Cuddebackville Dam scheduled to be removed in summer 2004; water management project launched with four states, New York City and a federal commission
| | | | |
