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, meaning roughly "little falls stream." Its waters rise from 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. The Albany-Hudson Electric Trail follows the Valatie Kill for ten miles from Nassau Lake to Valatie along a former trolley line that operated from 1900 to 1929 and now crosses the stream five times on new bridges. In the early 1800s, European settlers cleared most Hudson Valley forests for farms and shipped agricultural products efficiently 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 brought Midwestern farm products into eastern U.S. markets, leading to widespread abandonment of Columbia and Rensselaer County farmland and the reforestation of more than half the region. Today the woodlands differ greatly from the precolonial old-growth forest: American chestnuts once valued by Native Americans for food and timber were devastated by blight introduced in the early 1900s, ash trees are being killed by the invasive emerald ash borer, and climate change is favoring red oak and red maple while yellow birch, sugar maple, and red spruce decline. The Kinderhook Creek watershed also supports notable wildlife and landscapes, including the rare brook snaketail dragonfly, whose presence indicates high water quality and a need for undisturbed fields and woodlands, the eastern box turtle, a long-lived but vulnerable species in decline in New York, and Wild's Pond in Valatie, created by damming the Valatie Kill for mills in the 1820s and long regarded as scenic.