Tadpole bathtub ring
When we added a kitchen garden to our homestead, we knew that we needed a steady, reliable source of water. And lots of it. Enter the experience of having a pond. Digging out the pond was an interesting adventure all in itself. We situated it across from the garden, and laid a pipe through the adjacent wall so that we could hook up a hose and use that water for the garden. Oh yes, all that good fish emulsion (the word we use instead of fish poop) fertilizes the garden quite nicely. We have a saying around here… “you’re never really finished until you’ve done it three times.” And that certainly applies to the pond too.
Out came the bulldozer to dig out the nice level spot for the pond. It looked like a giant dirt playground. The man driving the bulldozer worked for a couple days on it. We could tell he was really enjoying moving all those huge mounds of dark, rich, red dirt. And then we waited for the rains to fill it up. We didn’t need a liner. The soil just held the water.
Next, we needed some fish, right? There was already a pond here on the property. Which seemed to have a good mix of bluegill, large and small mouth bass, and minnows. So we called some friends over for a fishing party. We transferred about 6-7 buckets of fish into the new pond. We later added 100 quarter-sized goldfish into the mix, and wallah! A pond was happening.
Oh, we had plenty of nay-sayers adding their two cents into the mix. They tried to discourage us from adding this pond near to the house, saying that it would just become a huge mosquito breeding ground. As the pond ecosystem seemed to be equalizing and balancing out, we were tickled that everything was going so “swimmingly” with it. Well, the heavy seasonal rains came, and the pond was filling up wonderfully. It began to look like it had always been here. Nice, full.
But the rains kept coming, and coming, and coming. And when the water level crested on the side closest to the front of the house, we thought… “huh, that water doesn’t seem to know that the spillway is on the other side of the pond.” The overflow was just a trickle at first. Then more and more and about a day and a half later, that trickle had etched a new cavern in the pond bank. That cavern got bigger and bigger, and water kept draining more and more through the crevasse. Yes, you guessed it. The pond bank leaked a TON of water over the edge until the pond wasn’t even a quarter full anymore. Emergency!
Out came the bulldozer man, who told us we would have to drain the pond the rest of the way out so he could regrade the bank to fix the slope so that the overflow would be directed correctly to the spillway. Oh man! Translation: start again. Transfer fish. Move dirt. Wait for rains. Transfer fish. Wait for more rains.
I’m telling you this so that you can appreciate the labor of love to get the pond back to a happy place. And when it was time to bring in baby ducks, my pond was ready. Don’t get me started on baby ducks. My favorite farm animal in the world! Looking at those fluffy yellow buddies paddling around in the water made all that work totally worth it. Spending time hanging out at the pond became a new pastime. And I began to notice a new rhythm, and cycle that was in motion. Life in and around the water was fascinating. So many water striders, and minnows, and dragonflies.
I started bringing dried meal worms out to the pond with me to feed to the ducks. They float when they hit the water, and it’s fun to watch the ducks smacking on them. But I was surprised to see a bunch of the bluegill also lip smacking on the floating treats as well. They make a funny suction noise when they suck them into their mouths from under the water.
Basically, this was high entertainment. So much to see. So many sights and sounds. Speaking of sounds, here’s where the frogs come in. At night we started noticing a literal concert of frog instruments playing out there. Deep ones. Higher toned ones. Short chirps. Low croaks. In my imagination there were hundreds out there singing to their heart’s content. In truth that song is very soothing and helps me sleep in blissful slumber.
When I was out playing with the ducks near the water’s edge one day, I shouldn’t have been so surprised by what I found. There floating right near the water’s edge along the bank of the pond was a black, stringy something. I positioned myself for a closer look. Yes, black, stringy and all along the entirety of the rim of the pond. Floating there. It looked like the pond had eyeliner on. Like what your tub looks like when you’ve drained it after your bath, and it left a dirt ring all around. Millions and millions of tadpole eggs were in these long black tubes. I just couldn’t get over the enormity of the effort it must have taken all those frog ladies to lay all those eggs.
I called the ducklings over to try and entice them to investigate the egg sacks. They seemed interested, but not so much into froggy escargot. Which made me a little concerned that if my ducks wouldn’t eat these eggs, would the fish? And if the fish didn’t eat them…I was going to have plague proportions of frogs very soon. I mean plague proportions! I’m not a math whiz, but percentage-wise there were going to be way too many.
I monitored the progress of the tadpole eggs as they got bigger. The stringy sacks became a little more translucent with each passing day. And the tadpoles began to look more and more like transfigured marvels. Bullfrogs, leopard frogs, treefrogs, toads. I think they must have all found a favorite nook in our new pond to get busy. And let me just add, that frogs eat a lot of mosquito larvae. So there’s that.
I think what was so fascinating to me about the experience was how simple, how natural, how perfectly essential and ordinary this was. And yet how magical. On such a large scale. Nature doing her thing. We just invited it to happen nearby.
As I drift off to sleep during the rainy spring nights around here, I think about all those busy frogs. Laying their eggs in the hope of tomorrow. The cycles and rhythms of nature. And I’m just so glad to get a front row seat out here in the countryside to watch the show.