Rising Tides

Remember my pond rebuilding project (click here if you missed that story)?  For a while, it was looking not-so-good.  I know it is because of the drought and the heat and I kept telling myself that I should be glad that it had any water in it at all.  That all sounds good, but it is hard to keep in mind when you're faced with a big, ugly, smelly hole filled with rather nasty looking water every day.  Especially when the terrible heat drives one's dog to swim in it anyway...

However, since the above photo was taken on August 7th, the drought has come to an end here and we have had several big storms that brought considerable rain with them.  With the rain, the water level in the pond has come up nearly five feet...

The water is still full of fine, clay silt and it will be for quite some time, I think it will be Spring at least before the silt settles out.  However, if you can look past it, you can see that the water itself is clear now...

The silt certainly does not bother the masses of frogs who moved back into the pond almost as soon as there was enough water to wet their backs.  They have laid masses of eggs, which are already starting to hatch.  In addition, I've seen at least one of the painted turtles sunning herself on the rocks and last week, Riding Buddy was here, and we both saw a bird visit the pond that neither of us had ever seen before.  It was some kind of Sand Piper we think, but nothing either of us have ever encountered.  I tried to get some photos, but it blended into the clay shore so well that it was nearly invisible.

As for the little salamanders that I am so fond of...a few days after the pond was dug out, I walked around the outside of it.  I saw hundreds of the salamanders and I was upset at first, but then I realized that they weren't dying at all.  They were making their slow way out into the woods and resuming the bright orange coloring of their terrestrial life stage....

A Red Eft - the terrestrial life stage of a North American Newt

It is simply amazing to me how such tiny creatures can survive this kind of upheaval and disruption...

And yet they do.  The pond is not even refilled yet and already, it has more diversity and signs of life than it has ever had.  In the Spring, I will add fish and I look forward to seeing what other sorts of creatures move in to investigate.