he Dover town land now slated for development was once owned by New York State. It is the site of what was, until 10 years ago, the campus of the 500-patient Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center. When the center closed down, the town lost several hundred jobs. Across the road from the facility is a nine-hole golf course, built on Great Swamp land in the 1920s (long before environmental regulations might have forbidden it) for the benefit of the center and the public. Now a developer plans to build houses on and around the golf course and renovate the hospital's buildings for apartments.
The grassy campus looks welcoming enough from the highway, but closer at hand the barred windows in the brick dormitories have a chilling effect. Behind the dormitories stands the abandoned eight-story psychiatric hospital where particularly ill patients were taken care of -- and often subjected to crude experimental procedures. The developer, I decide, will have to renovate not only the buildings but also their foreboding karma.
We don't stop but continue driving up into the forested hillside behind the hospital. At the crest of the hill there's an Appalachian trailhead. There are no current plans to develop these woods, but Klemens wants to make sure that he and the town know what's there in case plans change. There is good reason for his thoroughness: Protecting the vital habitats on a site can end up being a series of quid pro quos. The most sensitive habitats and their connected lands come off the table, and the developer can choose from what's left.
When we reach the first vernal pool -- a leaf-filled swale of water darkened by the tannins of decomposition -- we see that it's filled with translucent globular clusters of wood-frog eggs. Setting out his minnow traps to see if there are salamanders as well, Klemens is a happy man.
The traps set, we drive to the next pool marked on his topographical map. We actually hear this one before we see it. Spring peepers call to their mates, creating a high-pitched cacophony that sounds like a great flock of miniature geese. This pool is filled not only with wood-frog eggs but with the adult frogs themselves. They are small enough to sit on a silver dollar, and all we see of them are hundreds of pairs of tiny dark eyes. Wood frogs are the most common species in the vernal pools of the Northeast.
Over the course of the day we hit several more pools -- even a pond between the eighth and ninth holes of the golf course -- and set out some 50 minnow traps that we'll check and retrieve the next morning. The evening turns cool. The temperature is expected to dip to freezing overnight. Snow may fall. It's only just spring.
