Reflections and rotting leaves

 Reflections and Rotting Leaves

It was raining. I sat beside the pond in Gadley Woods and gave up trying to count the raindrops. The pond’s surface is a gray mirror, reflecting precise images. But the water. The water smells. Peering in, it holds little promise for me but that mandarin duck clearly approves, marshalling her double brood - or maybe she is baby-sitting someone else’s – with harsh rattling calls. There are two sizes of ducklings and about 16 in total. I’m impressed: well-behaved children. At my arrival she calls them from across the pond, hectic clockwork toys hurtling across the surface.

 

Other pond moments rise like bloodworms wriggling…..no frogs here, nor tadpoles nor newts. No fish to eat those mosquito larva. But stories wait in those rotting leaves, in the dark water, in the perfect reflections….

A while ago a group of us gathered pond images, our own stories of digging ponds, building ponds, watching ponds...these became the film with the link below

 

When you dig a pond and a robin helps you, watching and picking and taking the worms…when you start again and dig a pond and it fills with water, the first frog that jumps in sends ripples racing across the water. Every ripple is a consequence

 

A kingfisher on a branch watches, measures,

knows the frog is too big for her.

A heron comes, angular, long toes in soft earth,

A heron who will hunt the frog

The air above the pond becomes a territory of dragonflies,

Swallows dig mud from the bank for their nests and in the evening

Bats hawk over the open water in the hope of an early hatching

many thanks to all my pond-y friends and to

the wonderful Buxton Museum and Art Gallery 

for setting the whole thing up in the first place!