the pond

It is a cool cloudy day here, a quiet Monday morning. I decided to be brave and go look at the pond. I hate to see it when it is so low. This spring it was very high and beautiful. Some people’s ponds in the area are completely dried up. Our pond is out behind the barn and not too visible when the trees around it are leafed out. I have to sneak out there because if the dogs see me they climb over the fence if they are able to join me or if they are not climbers they bark and howl. They haven’t been to the pond this year because the fence around it has several spots they can get through. Then I can’t enjoy the pond; I have to go after them. When and if we ever get any money we are going to replace the fence. The big dogs stay with me but the little ones are all over the place, finding a way out so they can kill something on the other side.
Anyway I quietly slipped down to see the pond this am. I figure it has lost 10 foot in depth at the deep end and the shallowest part is completely dried up, middle part only about 6 foot across now. Grass and weeds are growing where water was this spring. My yellow flag iris is 6 foot from water now.
I hate to see the pond like this, but I guess it is kind of natural for it to recede in summer.
When we first moved here the pond was only a year old and the person who dug it probably didn’t know much about pond building. The previous owners wanted it for swimming and fishing. They dyed the water blue to keep the algae out and they had stocked the pond with bluegills and some bass. The place where they chose to dig the pond was odd, on higher ground behind the barn instead of out by the woods where it is low and naturally wet part of the year. I guess they wanted it close to the house. But they had to dig a huge hole down to the water table, probably 30-foot and then they piled the clay they took out over the surrounding area. The neighbors told us they had a hard time keeping water in the pond as the water that did seep in from the groundwater wanted to run towards the woods. So the pond sits down in a hole basically. It is a rough oval, longer than it is wide, about 150 foot by 75 foot I’d say. At the deep end the water is easily 15 foot deep in the spring and the shallow area about 3 foot. When we first moved in the banks were still bare and eroding into the pond. There was a cut down area on the south side so that you could walk down to the water near the shallow end but in heavy rain a lot of soil washed down that slope. We set to work planting grass and other plants along the banks. In some places we had to pile brush and logs along the bank slope to stabilize it. We planted a few trees a little way back from the edge, including a weeping willow. That first summer we swam in the pond, and I could feel the seeps where cold water bubbled up from underground under my feet. We put the blue dye in and fed the fish just like the previous owners. It was an unnatural blue color but pretty in its own way. The fish thrived and for a few years anyone who threw a line in could get a runty bluegill or an occasional whopper bass that ate the rapidly reproducing bluegills. Then one winter all the fish died because the water was low going into winter and I think there wasn’t enough oxygen left after the top froze. We haven’t replaced them, although we talk about it each year. The first few years after the pond was dug it only shrank a little each summer as the ground water was still seeping in. But over time a number of things happened. I think the water table dropped after several drought years and a lot of new wells and ponds in the area. The seeps may have been filled in by silt too. We don’t swim in the pond anymore because the muck on the bottom is so deep. The trees that grew up around the pond and make it more natural looking also suck water out of it. I think the major source of water now is run off and some years that is a considerable amount of water. This spring was very wet and we started the year with a very full pond, very deep water and the whole width of the basin was covered. And now after a dry summer we are down to about 6 foot of water in the deepest spot and half the basin is dry.
Well I guess it is a natural wetland, pond now. We haven’t put dye in it for years and cattails have grown up in the shallow end. We do have more native birds and animals around it too. There were never many frogs in the pond when there were fish, now there are hundreds.
The ducks were doing fine- we have two domestic males that must be 6 years old now, their females were picked off years ago by coyotes as they set on eggs. They keep the wild geese off their pond. They come up to the back of the barn where I feed the wildest cats and eat cat food. In the winter they spend a lot of time around the back of the barn keeping out of the deep snow. They had plenty of water left to swim in but as I sat on the bank watching them they swam over to my side, where the water was shallow and began taking baths. I thought that was odd, they were splashing and throwing water over their backs as birds do when bathing, but they had just been floating around in the same place. The little birds do appreciate the open shallow water though; there was a whole line of goldfinches bathing at the waters edge and I saw chickadees and other birds pop in and out. A killdeer was walking around in the shallow water. I saw no frogs this time, but I didn’t get down close to the water. There are tons of frogs up in the yard now, including a huge bullfrog I saw up in the dog’s yard.
So there are good things about the natural habitat the pond is now. We discussed trying to dredge down to the water table again, but I think this pond is poorly placed and may never be any better than this. If I had a lot of money I might fill this hole in and start again, down in the low area by the woods, but that is not likely to happen. Or we could cut the banks down on this pond and push the soil toward the low area to raise that- but we spent so much time getting vegetation to grow again on that subsoil they had thrown up around the pond that I hate to ruin it and start over. Or if we were really rich we could dig a well and install a pump just to keep it full, as one wealthy neighbor has done. His pond is much smaller though. We may put some Koi in the pond next spring- something to get tame and play with, and maybe they will reproduce and we can sell some of the offspring or maybe just some minnows or bluegills. Maybe.