In front of you lies the Tenakill Brook which begins in Tenafly, New Jersey and runs through downtown Demarest where it widens into the Demarest Duck Pond. Then it makes its way through the nature center and continues onward all the way to connect with the Oradell Reservoir, which provides drinking water for an estimated 750,000 people.
The Tenakill Brook is a critical water source and food source for various plants and animals in the Demarest Nature Center. For example, everything from birds (like ducks and egrets) to fish like the rainbow trout, largemouth bass, yellow perch, and bluegill. In addition, the brook supports the growth of plants along its banks.
For our Nature Center, the Tenakill Brook is more than just a water source. It’s a living classroom where we can learn about the interconnectedness of an ecosystem.
Recounts of the Tenakill Brook
This excerpt is from Something That You Know, a memoir by Ralph William Larsen, who grew up in Cresskill in the 1950s.
Oh, my, the Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn-like adventures we had on that slow-moving, smelly creek. Many a summer day was spent blowing up automobile or truck inner tubes and lashing wood, plywood if if we could find it, anything else if we couldn't, to the top those tubes to create a raft. And then, off we'd sail, not very fast because unless it rained forty days and forty nights and the brook swelled up and overflowed its banks down by the Demarest pond, the Tenakill was never much more than a meandering creek. But we used poles and sticks to push ourselves along gondola-style. the fevered dream was always to somehow get all the way from the Demarest pond down past what would later become the high school, and come out, triumphant, smelling like swamp and full of bug bites at the bottom of Madison Avenue in Cresskill.