As it starts to get warmer and sunnier, many of us start to look outside with growing anticipation. Summer is coming and soon there will be warm temperatures, buzzing cicadas, ice cream vans, swimming children, sweating grandparents, and millions of mosquitoes waiting to sample the populous for their yearly blood tax.
But as the days get warmer, only one thing's on my mind. Ponding. What's ponding you say? I learned the fine art of ponding as a first year counselor at Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln, MA and ever since then, it has stuck with me as the ideal nature exploration activity. Oh sure, you could go into the field and catch insects...you could even look for tracks and scat along the trails. But for up close and personal experiences, I would pick ponding any day! Simply put, ponding is the art of exploring the biodiversity of a pond with any tools at hand. Got some fish nets? Excellent! Got a sieve? Even better!
Yep, you heard me! Item number one on any ponders list is a sieve. They have finer holes than nets and are more rigid making for tougher mudders when you're trying to power through algae to test the waters for crayfish and other aquatic invertebrates.
Afraid to get your feet wet? Well it defeats the purpose of ponding if you don't get a little wet. But if you're adamant about staying dry, birding is another good way of taking nature into account. Water bodies of all sizes have some form of bird life inhabiting them from loons and diving ducks on reservoirs to Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Marsh Wrens (Cistothorus palustris) in cattail (Typha spp.) marshes to the gulls and terns of our coasts. Where ever there's water, you're bound to find a huge variety of bird life abounding just a few feet away.
Curious about the finned inhabitants of your local pond? Go fishing! It's one of the easiest ways to get in contact with members of a food web as well as seeing the variety of forms that fish have evolved into in order to survive. Using baitfish to catch Largemouth Bass (Micropterus salmoides), one can notice that the bigger fish tend to take bigger meals and will attack a wide variety of lures. Catching sunfish off the nest can illuminate the tenacity of these disc-shaped fish as well as reveal their intriguing breeding style. Rather than spawn in riffles of a river like trout, sunfish (Largemouth Bass included) carve a nest out of the muddy bottom using their fins and tails as fans. After the females have laid their eggs in the nest, the males defend their clutch with amazing ferocity, attacking anything that seems like a threat including a fisherman's lure.
There are more ways to explore ponds and other waterways! Kayaking and canoeing put you right on the waters film where all the action takes place, while swimming and diving allow you to see the world as a fish sees it. One can also look for frogs in the shallows and try to catch them too or watch turtles basking on logs and rocks along the shore.
With so much to explore out in the pond, it's a wonder more people haven't tried it! So get out there and find somewhere wet to investigate. It needn't be a wilderness lake for it to be an amazing experience. Just so long as you have the spark of discovery and the curiosity to pursue it, the natural world will provide like a well thumbed book. It may be old, moth-eaten, and sometimes downright dirty, but it's often the best place to start.
Have a lovely week.
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