Visiting the Brick Pond: Take 2
A couple of green herons posed for my daughters and I on our second Brick Pond visit. They’re so beautifully colored, yet also inherently comical with their brash call, short tail, and eager dash from one end of a log to the other.
I brought my Panasonic Lumix this time, a bridge camera instead of the heavier mirrorless Canon RP, to refresh my memory of its zoom. The resolution isn’t as sharp as I’d like, and I was reminded that it takes longer for the zoom lens to extend automatically than it does to zoom in with the Canon’s telephoto. But the zoom does take you in closer, so the object you want to photograph fills the viewfinder.
Camera comparisons aside, we reached the pond at midday on a mostly sunny day, though it was dimmed somewhat by the Canada wildfire smoke lingering in our area. Along with the herons, we saw some box turtles sunning themselves, as well as two giant snappers doing the same atop the beaver lodge across the pond. The other night we saw some beavers, but that was at dusk. No sign of them today.
Another giant snapper was impersonating a lily pad near the path back, and when we reached the parking area some men building a new observation deck showed us some snapper eggs they’d come upon earlier in the day. That was certainly a bonus!
All in all we left reminded of lives going on all around us, lives that don’t depend on us and make up a complex web of relationships in the pond. They’re about their business whether we take the time to look or not, but we were glad to get a glimpse of it.
