Dutch settlers colonized the Hudson River Valley in the first half of the 1600s, and the Valatie Kill took its name, pronounced "vah-lay-sha," from the Dutch words "vaal" for falls, "je" for little, and "kill" for stream or creek, roughly meaning "little falls stream." Its waters rise on the Rensselaer Plateau north of Nassau Lake, flow south through Kinderhook Lake to the Village of Valatie to meet Kinderhook Creek, and then join Stockport Creek, a tributary of the Hudson River. In the early 1800s, European settlers cleared most Hudson Valley forests for farms and shipped agricultural products to New York City by way of the Hudson River, but the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the rapid spread of railroads opened midwestern farmlands to eastern U.S. markets, contributing to widespread abandonment of Columbia and Rensselaer County farms and the reforestation of more than half the region. Today the woodlands differ sharply from the precolonial old-growth forest: American chestnuts were decimated by a blight introduced in the early 1900s, ash trees are falling victim to the emerald ash borer, climate change is favoring red oak and red maple, and yellow birch, sugar maple, and red spruce are declining. The Kinderhook Creek watershed also supports the rare brook snaketail dragonfly, whose presence indicates high water quality and which depends on undisturbed fields and woodlands, while the greater watershed is home to the eastern box turtle, a slow-maturing species in decline in New York. The Valatie Kill also fed Wild's Pond in Valatie, dammed for mills in the 1820s, and its course is now followed for ten miles by the Albany-Hudson Electric Trail along a former trolley line that operated from 1900 to 1929.