About 33 years ago, Paula said, "That's it. We have an incredibly ugly back yard. Do something!"
Luckily, while staying up one night with one of my patients in labor, I met her husband, an NC State-trained landscape architect, who said, "Lemme take a look."
The neighbors kindly allowed a backhoe to come up their driveway into the back yard and dig a narrow winding pond. A liner, a couple tons of big rocks later and - voila! A pond!
All of the kids except one fell (or were pushed) in at one time or another.
One of Paula's friends was visiting one day and they caught her five-year-old tossing things in, including Legos and our oldest daughter's high school diploma. The grandkids discovered that a whitewater kayak could fit in the pond and how many kids it could actually carry.
Ponds attract lots of things, other than the items mentioned above, such as leaves, pine needles, more Legos, and live stuff! We plunked in some cheap goldfish who called it home and they started having babies. Frogs somehow found it and did likewise. Water skimmers, dragonflies and others found it posted on some bulletin board and joined the party.
The hospital was rotating out an older microscope that they felt could no longer be cleaned to standards and gave it to me. I bought some glass slides and cover slips and we looked at some pond slime.
WOW! If you though that the macro joint was jumping, the microscopic world was going nuts! There were rotifers and amoebas, paramecia and water bears, daphnia and volvox, vorticella and spirogyra! All flitting about eating each other! How did they get in there?!
Oh, mistakes were made, wildlife-wise. Someone kindly offered some tadpoles, which unfortunately turned out to be future bullfrogs. Unfortunately? Yeah, the adults are voracious omnivores, meaning that they will eat anything they can fit their gaping mouths around. Fish, other frogs, baby birds, small children, foreign cars, you name it. I emailed several herpetologists (people who study such creatures) at big universities and I got back varied answers: "Learn to love the bullfrogs." "Get a rifle." "Drain the pond for three years and you might get rid of them." It took me three years, a scuba dive light, a long-poled net and moonless nights to finally flip the last huge, wily female out of the pond, chase her across the yard and deposit her in a lake far enough away that she probably couldn't hitch hike back.
Our little ecosystem attracted other wildlife. Bats would silently flutter in to take a drink on the wing.
Great blue herons put us on their map - what's not to like? Shallow water? Color-coded fish that can't go deep? and they'd stock up in winter when the smarter fish in the local lakes went to the bottom.
I saw several hawks carrying away my beloved Southern Green Frogs (Lithobates clamitans)
and the occasional raccoon would drop by to see what was on the menu. It probably didn't help that the (not very smart) goldfish learned that things they saw moving above the water might be going to feed them, and Hey, let's go see!
A family of garter snakes has moved in, and are occasionally spotted catching some sun.
Chipmunks have burrowed homes among the rocks and go skittering around nervously (see "hawks" above).
So, being such a wild habitat, it takes care of itself, right? I wish. The surrounding plant life figures out that there is free water and sends roots. Stuff falls in from the trees and accumulates. Soggy high school diplomas and Legos have to be fished out. An occasional tree branch punches a hole in the liner, blah, blah, blah.
Paula can't stand disorder, and she weeds and cleans around the edges periodically. However, she has had some close calls leaning over. She announced one November that she wanted waders for Christmas, so I did my research and found her some good ones.
However, I knew that it wouldn't sound good telling people that I had bought my wife fishing waders for Christmas, so I had to get her a cashmere sweater also. And some other stuff. Anyway, she delights in her waders and periodically gets in and fixes things up.
I also get to help muck it out from time to time, and like I mentioned, you find all sorts of stuff.
As above, it's a real ecosystem, attracting all sorts of crazy animals.
Would we go to the trouble again? Absolutely! It has been a magnet for our kids, then grandkids and other creatures, and I love reading by it on quiet summer mornings and evenings, listening to the trickling water.
Just don't bring me any unapproved tadpoles, and leave my Lithobates clamitans alone.
Dave & Paula
