Pond Surprises and Other Things

We've been having yard work done lately. We actually hired two people to come and weed whack around the house and outside the fence perimeter. It really looks so much better when knee-high grasses, vines, sticky things, burrs and dried out vegetation is cut-away. It looks neat. I should have taken before and after photos, but who needs to see an over-grown patch of land in a dry summer heat? We all know what that looks like. It ain't green and it ain't pretty. An after pic would still look dry, but somehow manicured, if weeds whacked within an inch of their lives can look manicured.

We asked the yard crew to pull some of the cat-tails down by the pond. They were choking off the outflow, and would only get worse if we left them to grow. We liked the way they looked (and their pollen makes good bread), but they are not particularly healthy for the long life of the pond. They had encroached quite a bit in the three years that we've been here. So, the crew arrived early one morning and started going at it.

Click on the pic to see the purple arrows pointing at the mosquito fish!

We went down to chat with them, and they reported very enthusiastically about the life teeming in that pond. They saw turtles (seriously, we had no idea there were turtles here) lots of "crawdads." I had found the empty red shell of one the first summer we were here, but none since. It took just a minute of looking and we saw three right away and a little gray young one. It was quite a gratifying surprise. We also saw literally hundreds, if not thousands, of mosquito fish. We knew we had some, but the sheer numbers amazed us. In fact, one of the work crew offered to go into business with us selling mosquito fish. She told us we could sell two for a dollar. We have a little mosquito fish gold mine right here in the gold mining foothills of the Sierra. But we declined. We like the pond teeming with life, including the crayfish, which one of our neighbors suggested we catch and eat. No thanks. We want all the little critters just where they are, in their natural habitat in our little human-made pond.