River Fest at Lyndhurst Castle

Lyndhurst Castle hosted Westchester County's River Fest, a Quadricentennial celebration which featured the very fun and educational Hudson River Quest for kids. There was a Quest Poem, with clues about Hudson River history and ecology to complete, and stations with different activities, completion of which got you a stamp in your Quest booklet. At the end of the day, the kids got a certificate and a little prize for finishing. Some of the activities were: exploring the rose garden; trying out old fashioned toys like stilts and rolling hoops with a stick; drawing a Hudson River scene; viewing a bird of prey demonstration; measuring the circumference of an apple tree; making a corn print bookmark; finding out what might have been in Henry Hudson's sea chest, and more.






There were also a huge number of booths where kids could make crafts, learn that plants don't need dirt to grow(courtesy of the Science Barge), learn about honey bees and bee-keeping from Let it Bee Apiaries, sift through compost and leaf litter to view the decomposers at work (Mikro really enjoyed chatting with Ellen, the lady runing this booth, and even told her about his favorite critters, including his"favorite parasites"...), a session with Atka, the ambassador wolf from the Wolf Conservation Center, live animals from the Greenburgh Nature Center and Teatown Lake Rservation, and lots more that I am undoubtedly forgetting to mention, but enjoyed immensely.









After we finished the Quest and touring all the exhibitors and vendors, we were glad to partake of the air conditioned indoor lectures and concerts later that afternoon. We enjoyed folksinger Jerry Silverman's New York Sings: 400 Years Years of the Empire State in Song concert; Eric Sanderson's slide show and lecture about his awesome Mannahatta Project: The Science Behind Manhattan in 1609, which reveals what the ecology of precolonial and colonial Mahattan was like, and a wonderful presentation by Evan Pritchard, author of Native New Yorkers, about Henry Hudson and the Algonquins.

What a great day!