"Demystifying Greenbrook" (Palisades Interstate Park

Sep / Oct '05

Demystifying Greenbrook

To many of our visitors, even those who are otherwise familiar with the New Jersey Section of the park, Greenbrook Sanctuary—the 165-acre cliff-top preserve that straddles the Alpine-Tenafly border—is something of a mystery. The simple truth is that the Sanctuary is one of the most beautiful and most important places in the park.

Greenbrook Sanctuary was created in 1946, in large part as a response to community concerns about the proposed Palisades Interstate Parkway. What effect on wildlife would the new roadway have? A nature sanctuary was proposed for a rugged area through which the Parkway, which would otherwise stay close to the cliff edge, would not enter.

Today, Greenbrook holds within its fences roughly 6.5 miles of hiking trails and is home to several different ecosystems. Managed by the Palisades Nature Association, a not-for-profit organization established to promote and manage Greenbrook, the Sanctuary is set in a kind of rimmed “bowl” on top of the Palisades ridge, with bogs and wetlands, along with a manmade pond, in the lowlands at its center. The rim along its western edge, besides offering some challenging slopes for hikers, helps shield the Parkway from view and hearing within the Sanctuary. To the east, streams cascade through ravines down the mountainside. Within the Sanctuary are a Native Plant Project, an interpretive center, and other facilities.

The Sanctuary is open year-round, offering educational opportunities for its members as well as others. Almost every weekend day throughout the year, Greenbrook offers hikes and programs on various topics, ranging from birding to mushroom identification to insect life. In addition to these, the Sanctuary regularly holds programs for scout and school groups during the week; Greenbrook worked with five scout groups and about thirty school groups in 2004 alone. It also provides outreach programs, such as lectures and slide shows, outside of the Sanctuary, for groups such as local garden clubs, Audubon groups, and the Sierra Club. Greenbrook does some mentoring as well, most recently with an Eagle Scout who worked with director and naturalist Nancy Slowik on the self-guided tour now at State Line Lookout.

Greenbrook is, however, more than a nature preserve for native flora and fauna offering the type of programs traditionally associated with nature centers. In perhaps its most important role, the Sanctuary serves as a center for scientific study. Greenbrook keeps its own internal records, tracking data on various aspects of the wildlife within the Sanctuary; examples would include its breeding bird survey, in which the staff and volunteers scour the Sanctuary for nesting birds every two years. The internal records that Greenbrook keeps prove useful not only to the Sanctuary and the park on the whole, but to other researchers as well. For example, Greenbrook recently shared some of its phenological information on blossom dates for tulip trees with a researcher studying global warming; it turns out that this species of tree is temperature sensitive, and the Sanctuary happened to have the dates of the earliest blooms for the past 25 years.

Greenbrook not only undertakes its own data collection, but also participates in larger research projects and opens its gates to other researchers. The Sanctuary submits data for the Christmas Bird Count run by the Audubon Society; for the Fourth of July Butterfly Count sponsored by the North American Butterfly Association; for the International Migratory Bird Day; and for rare bird sightings to New Jersey Audubon. Fordham and Rutgers Universities used Greenbrook as a field station in 2004 as they worked with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection as part of a larger state-wide study entitled “Forestry Impacts from Atmospheric Nitrogen Deposition.” An individual researcher has been studying macroinvertebrates in streams since the early 1990s at Greenbrook and now in Rockland County and the Alpine Scout Camp as well.
Throughout its over half a century of existence, this unique Sanctuary has and continues to serve as a nature preserve, field station, research center, outdoor classroom, and scenic refuge for its members. “For most members, Greenbrook provides an opportunity to escape their fast-paced life in a nearby scenic sanctuary,” says director Nancy Slowik. But, she adds, “Insiders know that Greenbrook’s legacy is realized as a field station and repository for year-round natural history observations.”

To become a member of the Palisades Nature Association/Greenbrook Sanctuary, or for more information, click here or call 201 768-1360 or visit our Park Headquarters in Alpine.

The membership fees are:

$35 for an individual

$45 for a household

$80 for a contributor

$250 for a stewardship

$500 for a life member

$50 for an organization

Donations are also accepted.

Throughout the year, Greenbrook staff leads programs in the Park that are open to the general public .

For more information about Greenbrook and its programs:
201 784-0484 / 768-1360 / greenbrook@njpalisades.org

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