I’m a little late reporting this, but I can’t really find any negative affect on you regarding it, so I’m not going to feel too bad. Not about that, anyway.
Last week we got a long period of rain that apparently dumped a lot more water on us than we’d thought, because the next morning, the edge of the pond where we do all the critter feeding, what we call the Apron, looked quite a bit different.
That’s the very spot featured in nearly all of the duck and geese videos and stills, and where I was standing for a lot of the nutria videos. All of the cypress knees that the bebbies were dodging around had been at the base of that tree to the right, which has never been in the water until now. Another view:
This is the same area viewed from the side, just a little back from where I’d shot a lot of video clips; you can just barely see the tips of some cypress knees peeking up to the immediate left of the tree there, almost hidden by reflections of the sky. Also note a few right at the lower left of the frame. I point these out for reference.
And the kayak dock:
We weren’t too worried about all this, knowing it was exceeding the beaver dam well down the pond and that it would flow over top before the beavers could take advantage of the higher water level. But a big surprise was in store for us within 24 hours.
And abruptly, not only had the flooding ceased, the pond reached a level far lower than it had ever been. You can compare this to the second pic above, though I messed up and was standing much farther back for this frame, but the knee tips that I’d pointed out in the lower left of the frame are visible here in the center, with a slightly paler rock behind them. That same rock had been a little under the surface for most of the time that we’d been here, since we distributed corn across its surface so the ducks wouldn’t have to dive so deep. Then as the level started to rise, it gradually disappeared, until virtually everything else did too. And now it’s completely exposed, and the pond has been reduced to mud flats with small channels throughout. Also note the tangle of roots and knees now exposed to the left of the trunk here. Very disappointing.
A comparison view of the dock:
Yeah, that might be ten centimeters of water at the end of the dock now, but really, we’re not using it for the kayaks at this point. See that stump to the left of the dock? That had been under the surface by several centimeters, but not quite enough not to interfere with the kayaks, and I’d made several attempts to cut it away, eventually hacking off the top few centimeters with a hatchet when the machete, the bow saw, and the wire saw all proved ineffective.
Turtle Island has returned, rather distinctly:
I have a comparison pic for this, too, taken when I was chasing the green heron on this same tree but I forgot to post it with those. Look immediately left of center, at that small stump that the beavers cut off, in front of the larger, most upright trunk, because this is what it looked like before both the flood and the recession:
This yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta) was on the only portion of the island still above water here. We lost roughly half a meter of depth, literally overnight.
One more illustration.
I didn’t think to specifically focus on these when I was out there, but these are the branches at the right of the frame of Turtle Island. And you’ve seen them before, because these were the perches that the green heron (Butorides virescens) was hunting from a few days back, like so:
As you might imagine, we’re about sick with all this, because we don’t have a pond now, just a swamp with only a trickle of water through it, and the wildlife activity has already dropped considerably.
But what the hell happened? I did a little trailblazing and hiked down to the beaver dam, since I wasn’t going to paddle down there in a kayak, expecting to see it totally blown out. On the way I noticed that the stream on the east edge of the property had dropped by the same amount. But the dam was surprisingly intact, with a small breach that the beavers had already started to patch, yet the water level was well below this so it wasn’t the culprit. The best I can surmise right now is that there was another dam of sorts someplace farther down the stream that gave way, though whether this was another beaver dam or a natural log jam, or what, I can’t say, and presently can’t get down there to see it, though I may put the kayak in the stream (still deeper than the pond) and try to find it.
Our best hope right now is that it was another beaver dam, an active one, because they’ll work to build it back up very quickly, and the water level will start coming back up with every rain. If it isn’t that, well, we’re not sure how soon, if ever, it will be restored. There are a couple of other options that we have, all of them involving some heavy labor in poorly accessible areas, but for now they’re just ideas. We’ll just have to see what develops, or can be found with more searching.
But yeah, losing the pond is a major blow all around, and not only to photography because we enjoyed just having the body of water there. Things happen, and it could be worse, but we’ll still grouse about it for a while.