Pond Life

As we move into April I’m seeing more and more

appearing and emerging in the pond behind our house.

For the past week we’ve had visitations of wood ducks in the pond in the early morning. Most mornings there are a pair and trio of wood ducks (two males, one female) cruising around the pond checking out the neighborhood.

So far, the wood ducks only stay for an hour or less before they fly somewhere else. As the weather warms I’m hoping they will stay longer and that a pair will claim the nest box across the pond.

Looking at the pond, all I could think was that it is an incredible thing, how a whole world can rise from what seems like nothing at all.

– Sarah Dessen

We’ve also had daily visitations of a pair of Canada geese and many mallards. The geese have been spending a lot of time in our backyard and even came up close to the house to look in the patio window once. One is almost always on what I call guard duty, scanning the landscape for any danger, while the other eats. I rarely see both of them browsing for food at the same time.

Annual Appearances

I saw the first painted turtles of the season on the log at the edge of the pond two days ago. Painted turtles on the log is a spring and early summer constant that I look forward to. Soon the spring peepers and other frogs will begin singing their loud mating songs at night and if I open our bedroom windows I’ll go to sleep serenaded by their songs.

So many wonders contained in such a small body of water. Tree reflections ripple across the clear water during this early spring season. Later the pond will be covered with various growths of algae or other small plants that create a kind of sludge on the surface of the water. But now I rejoice in reflections of trees and sky.

A Microcosm of Life and Death

Watching the pond life ebb and flow it is as if I am watching a microcosm of life and death, beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow. I see the mating dances of the geese and ducks, watch the ducklings or goslings grow and change, sometimes seeing that their numbers have decreased due to predation since last I saw the family. Yesterday I found a scattering of feathers near the pond and knew that some bird had become a meal for some predator. I brought a few of the feathers home to admire their beauty and I was able to identify them online as tail feathers of a mourning dove. This is life in all its beauty and brutality.

No wonder Mary Oliver wrote so often about ponds in her poems.

At the Pond

One summer
I went every morning
to the edge of a pond where
a huddle of just-hatched geese

would paddle to me
and clamber
up the marshy slope
and over my body,

peeping and staring —
such sweetness every day
which the grown ones watched,
for whatever reason,

serenely.
Not there, however, but here
is where the story begins.
Nature has many mysteries,

some of them severe.
Five of the young geese grew
heavy of chest and
bold of wing

while the sixth waited and waited
in its gauze-feathers, its body
that would not grow.
And then it was fall.

And this is what I think
everything is all about:
the way
I was glad

for those five and two
that flew away,
and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one
that had to stay.

— Mary Oliver