Puddock Hill Journal – Entry #3: My first pond teaches me.
My experience with environmental stewardship began when we were living in Bedford Hills, New York, in Westchester County back in the nineties.
At the beginning of that decade, we bought our first property outside the city: ten acres of lawn, fields and woods; an old falling-down dairy barn; another small barn that had been converted to a cottage; and a set of sugar maple trees that put on a spectacularly fiery fall show that I miss to this day. (Here in the Brandywine Valley, sugar maples are at the southernmost end of their eastern range, and they’re further stressed by climate change.)
The property’s most salient feature was a half-acre pond teeming with wildlife, from visiting kingfishers to resident bluegills to fat bullfrogs to leeches. Yes, leeches! Dogs wading into the pond muck sometimes emerged with free-riders attached. The dogs would be blissfully oblivious, which I suppose is how leeches succeed in life.
Our house sat maybe 40 yards away from the pond, up a small rise, the enclosed second-story porch affording an unobstructed view of the water. While I commuted to New York at the time, on weekends my wife, Pam, and I spent countless hours peering over books or newspapers or our dinner plates at a perpetual show. We’d watch whitetail deer and red foxes come down to drink, and see signs (such as tracks in the snow or the muddy shore) of nocturnal visits from raccoons and possums. On spring and summer evenings, the peepers and bullfrogs serenaded us. On warm summer days, dragonflies flitted about. Songbirds rested in nearby trees.