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The Reist
Sanctuary Setting
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Believe one who knows: you will find something
greater
in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you
can never learn from masters.
St. Bernard
One impulse from a vernal wood
May Teach you more of man.
Of moral evil and of good.
Than all the sages can.
From the The Tables Turned, William Wordsworth
The Reist Sanctuary, because of a small addition is now 111.238
acres (c. 45 ha.) in extent and is located in the Town of Niskayuna of
Schenectady County, New York. It is circled by a 2.9-mile series
of Roads providing a set of access points: Saint David’s Lane, Brendan
Lane, Consaul Road,
Balltown Road, Oakmont Street, Heather Lane, Thackeray Court, Village
Road,
Morgan Avenue and back to Staint David’s Lane. The relief is gentle
ranging
from a high point of 472 feet above sea level (asl) in the northwest
corner
of the Preserve to a low of 378 feet asl in the southwest – a range of
nearly one-hundred feet. It is traversed by a sewer line running
east-west,
the right-of-way of which is maintained free of trees and brush by the
Town
of Niskayuna providing interesting ecological diversity for the Hidden
River Trail.
The stratigraphic sequence begins with surficial sands, probably of
Aeolian origin thus suggesting that the mounds of the northern sector
were once
sand dunes. Rounded stones can be found in a few rock walls and shallow
stream courses of the Sanctuary. These heavy and well tested
rocks,
best evident in the water ways have been brought south from parental
sites
in the Adirondacks and elsewhere.by either glaciers or floating ice. A
feature of the Sanctuary is the vernal pools in the northeast sector
and the forested wetlands or swamps of the southern part. The
physiological adaptations of plants to wetland soils and the ecological
relationships of the swamp community are thus ideal topics
for teaching, study and research.
Beneath the sands there may be a varved bed of bluish-gray glacial lake
clay. We must question contractors engaged in nearby construction.
Beneath these proposed clay beds are 2,000 feet of Middle to Late
Ordovician strata of the Snake Hill Formation, some 450 million years
old. These are composed of alternating horizontal layers of shale and
more durable turbidite, the latter a fine-grained, light gray stone
resulting from deep sea deposits laid down by turbidity currents. These
are caused by sediments slumping
from the coastal slopes and entraining much water to flow at great
speed
(40 mph) into the oceanic depths. The source of these sediments is the
ancient
islands once emerging to the east. There are no exposures of the
shale
or turbidite strata on the Sanctuary although pieces of the turbidite -
called greywacke - can be occasionally found.
Settlement, forest clearing, grazing and cultivation began in the 1600s
with the Pearse Family being among the early, local settlers. The
Pearse Homestead, restored by Paul Schaefer in 1934, survives to the
southeast of the Sanctuary on Saint David’s Lane. (Rectangular pits
suggest that the remains of other early buildings exist on the
Sanctuary but these are yet to be studied.). Two Red Pine plantations
were established by Dr, Henry Reist and Paul Schaefer in the mid-1930s
and survive adding further diversity to the Sanctuary.
Acquisition of the Pearse Farm by Dr. Henry Reist and their assignment
to
the Hudson-Mohawk Bird Club are detailed above in the Reist biography.
A system of color-marked trails has been developed: a core Yellow
Trail, a set of Red Trails connecting the trailheads to the Yellow
Trail, the
orange, east-west Hidden River Trail, the Northern Blue Trail and the
Southern
Blue Trail – the latter two trails best serving for special education
and
research purposes. The wheelchair access is available at the
Hummingbird
Manor trailhead.
The Reist Sanctuary is owned and maintained by the Hudson-Mohawk Bird
Club. The president is Dan Welch (1-518-477-9317); the chairman of the
Sanctuary Committee is Carl George (1-518-388-6330).
The groves were God’s first temples.
Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them – ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood.
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks,
And supplication. . . .
From A Forest Hymn
William Cullen Bryant
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