Ponds & Streams
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Pond Dwellers
Visiting the local pond, we were greeted by this affable green frog.
He looks like he’s wearing a medal. Maybe that explains the sense of security he radiated.
We noted a whole crew of young wood ducks, grown by leaps and bounds since we last saw them. They whistled quietly to each other as they sailed by.
Naturally, we saw — and were observed by — some wary green herons. Such a combination of vivid beauty and drollery! Everything about them seems exaggerated somehow, from the shape and coloration of head and beak, to the expressive eyes, to the stubby tails, to the harsh cries. They always make me smile.
I absolutely love them.
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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.
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Visiting the Brick Pond: Take 1
It’s been the rainiest spring I can remember, and it felt good to get out yesterday and today to visit a favorite local wetland. I wasn’t prepared for photos, so most of these were taken via my phone.
My daughter and I took our walk in the early afternoon, and we enjoyed so many sights and reminders of natural wonders that we returned in the evening with my husband and other daughter.
It may sound strange, but the “jackpot” sighting for me was a tree frog! I’ve heard them many times but never seen one. As we were heading back in the evening, the frogs were holding forth, and I just managed to sneak up on one and actually get a glimpse of one of these amazing croakers.
This album captures some of the sights. My daughters and I actually found ourselves back there today, but those pics will be for another post.
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Walking the Gorge III: To the Top & Back Down
Some of the prettiest parts of the climb come between the Pinnacle Rock and the top of the trail. At that point, we cross the stream and descend a wooded trail with few glimpses of the gorge. The backs of our legs were feeling it by the end for sure, but there’s something fitting about the long descent and time to reflect.
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Walking the Gorge Trail II: To the Pinnacle
After resting at the first overlook, it’s time to climb again. The trail takes you along Buttermilk Creek, a kaleidescope of rock sculptures, patterns of light and color, and geological displays that prompt you to consider your own brief lifespan against the patient workings of water on rock over thousands of years.
- What shape are the experiences of my life carving into me?
- A place like this provides a disciplinary check on humanity’s sense of our importance and power in the universe. How do I hold onto that humility? How should it shape my approach to life?
The trail includes a shortcut – a bridge you can take to the Rim Trail on the other side of the stream, taking you back to the parking lot below.
Don’t take it. If you do, you’ll miss the satisfaction of the Pinnacle Rock marking the end of the steepest ascent.
But there’s still more. I’ll finish the walk in the next post. Meantime, here are the rest of my photos for this segment of the walk.
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Autumn Rambles
Green Heron On a walk, it’s safe to assume that surveillance is being conducted by some creature or other. This green heron is one example. It took a few minutes to ensure that we weren’t a threat before continuing the all-important business of hunting pond organisms for its lunch.
I’ve compiled images from three different walks into this gallery. There are enough photos that the slideshow spills over to a second page, reached by the arrow at bottom. It’s not a super colorful fall here — more yellows and browns than reds and oranges. But the unique autumn sunlight and odors of autumn give familiar trails a touch of enchantment just the same.
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Pond Album
I never followed up my heron post with the other pictures from my Sapsucker Woods walk. Here they are — a reminder that we always see new sights. Several of these plants are unfamiliar to me, and I need to follow up on them.
I’d also like to learn more about frogs. Years ago I took a picture of one sitting atop the ice on a frozen marsh in winter. On this walk, I saw this handsome fellow with his bubbly smile. I wonder: why the bubbles?
Anna Botsford Comstock is no help in this, but I do learn from her Handbook of Nature Study that:
- Their ears are the round gray spots next to their eyes. They’re visible on the frog in the picture.
- Frogs hibernate, burrowed into the mud of ponds. What made the one on ice appear in January remains a mystery. Reading the rest of that post makes me think it was an unseasonably warm spell, because the birds also were behaving as if it was spring. The frog may have been doing the same thing.
- They are a favorite food of herons. This I knew already.
- They can cover ground much more quickly than toads due to their muscular, developed hind legs, but water is their home environment.
- Frogs have a chameleon power to change to the color of their surroundings. This reminded me of one that I found on my kitchen counter shortly after my husband and I moved in. At that time the counter was dark green — in keeping with the original ’70s vintage of the kitchen! — and the frog sat motionless on it, identical in color, next to the sink. I was sure it was a prank, a plastic frog placed there by my husband, but in fact it was a real frog. I have no idea how it got there, other than perhaps it came through the drain. It’s the one and only indoor frog I’ve ever seen. I moved it out to the front step and later in the day it was still there but had changed to gray.
So much for my brief investigation of Comstock’s comments on frogs. Now on to the pictures.
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Field Notes: Great Blue Heron
There were lots of sights at Sapsucker Woods this week when my daughter and I went for our first walk there in two years: interesting plants, frogs, fungi, berries, and damselflies performing strange feats. But the great blue heron stalking its prey in the pond stole the show.
Hunting heron, with 5 box turtles watching from a nearby log The Handbook of Nature Study doesn’t include a section on these birds, but Peter Rabbit, the narrator of The Burgess Bird Book, accurately notes that “Plunger [the osprey] hunts for his fish while Longlegs waits for his fish to come to him.” (Links to books are Amazon Associate links.) Peter gives a wonderfully exact description of Longlegs’s appearance, then notes his behavior:
Longlegs waded into the water a few steps, folded his neck back on his shoulders until his long bill seemed to rest on his breast, and then remained as motionless as if there were no life in him. . . By and by [Peter] began to wonder if Longlegs had gone to sleep. His own patience was reaching an end and he was just about to go on in search of Rattles the Kingfisher when like a flash the dagger-like bill of Longlegs shot out and down into the water. When he withdrew it Peter saw that Longlegs had caught a little fish which he at once proceeded to swallow head-first. Peter almost laughed right out as he watched the funny efforts of Longlegs to gulp that fish down his long throat.
We had a front row seat to this drama at Sapsucker Pond. The difference is that the fish was large, and it didn’t inspire laughter.
After a long wait, the heron caught a good-sized fish.
It immediately carried the fish to shallow water, seemingly aware that this would ensure an easier recovery if the fish flopped loose, walking slowly and deliberately so as not to drop its prey.
At the end, it reoriented the fish (now wriggling desperately) somehow, then tipped its head up and swallowed it.
It concluded the process with a few gulps of water, dipping down for a mouthful and then pointing its beak to the sky.
It’s a handsome, gawky, almost prehistoric looking bird, and I can’t begrudge it its need to eat, especially factoring in the great patience and deliberation it demonstrated. But it was hard to watch. It reminded me of my love-hate relationship with nature. I love the beauty, variety, endlessly interesting adaptations of our subjects. But I hate the cold-blooded predation.
Is there a value in seeing this?
What I think of is that it has the value of knowing about something real in animal existence, and human existence. Like the heron, we eat other living creatures. Unlike the heron, we can register the inherent violence, and this carries with it a greater responsibility to ensure a good quality of life for any living creatures we consume, and to minimize the cruelty of slaughter. For some, it means choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet.
In any case, the heron’s behavior meant more than a meal for the bird. It offered some food for thought to its human observers through an essential glimpse the natural world in operation.
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Greenwood Park
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Sapsucker Spring
