Neighborhood Pond – August 2020
/My goal was to get to the neighborhood pond before sunrise so I left the house shortly after 6 AM and walked briskly down the street taking only one picture along the way and walking through a spider web that bridged the sidewalk between a mailbox and a small tree. I never saw the web but was brushing off the spider silk for the rest of the walk to the pond and hoping the spider had made it to a side of the web and wasn’t crawling around on me!
The pond was quieter than expected. The red-winged blackbirds are no longer defending their territory. There were some crows nearby.
The grasses are making seeds
And so are the milkweed. The meadow behind the pond has a good stand of healthy-looking plants…but no evidence of Monarch caterpillars that I could see without wading into the taller vegetation.
The cattails are maturing. They are expanding all around the pond…still a lot of young plants that haven’t made seed pods this year but provide plenty of cover for frogs and birds.
I heard the calls of green frogs and saw a few in the water…lumps with bulging eyes.
There was a green heron that was difficult to photograph through the vapor coming up from the surface of the pond. I saw one last month at the pond as well…maybe the same one. It would be great to have a resident green heron at the pond. There was one several years ago as well.
I didn’t see the painted turtle…hope it is still around.
I experimented with different settings as the sun came up….getting reflections and silhouettes. The silhouette image with the color in the sky is probably my favorite image of the morning.
There were more sounds on my way back to the house…the neighborhood waking up. I looked at the oaks in our neighborhood. Some don’t look so good. Our oak tree seems OK even though it has a rough time with the cold weather in late spring.
The morning sunlight shows off the fall color already developing in its leaves…although they aren’t falling yet like some of the other trees are….and it doesn’t have a lot of dead branches either…a sign that it is a healthy tree.
