The Nature of My Pond

These small self-sufficient ecosystems contain a surprising abundance of wildlife. Writer Cecily Ross patiently watches the life of a pond unfold before her

by Cecily Ross

It is well to have some water in your neighbourhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

As ponds go, ours isn’t much – a 15-metre-across shallow puddle set in the middle of a hayfield. In fact, the pond is so understated that when my husband and I bought this farm in the northeast corner of Dufferin County almost four years ago, the realtor didn’t even mention it.

We first walked the 39-hectare property in late October and, although we discovered the woodlot at the far west end and a wetland in the southeast corner, we somehow missed a small watery trough obscured by the rolling fields and long grass.

It wasn’t until we moved in the following February that one day, as I was skiing over the expanse of frozen crust beyond the barn, I came upon a brief indentation in the vast whiteness and what looked like a patch of ice blown bare by the wind. Poking through the snow around it were the brown and fuzzy tips of cattail heads gone to seed.

“I think we have a pond,” I told Basil that evening, though it was impossible to tell for sure, because the meagre evidence I had noticed was soon obliterated by inevitable drifts of snow. Still, for the rest of the winter I fantasized about our pond, imagining languorous swims in its clear, dark waters on hot and hazy summer afternoons.

It was not to be.

What emerged in spring was a distinctly unimpressive water-filled bowl set in a hayfield beside the wetland. This swampy area was presided over by a few dead elms and hemlocks, some ancient cedar trees, weedy poplars and a lone white birch. The banks of the pond, which, I later learned, had been dug in the 1960s as a watering hole for cattle, were bare except for a mat of dead grass and weeds and, on the east side, a thicket of unidentified shrubbery that showed little sign of life. The pond itself was rimmed by a dun-coloured tangle of last year’s cattails. From the relative height of the south bank, I could look down into the water – at its deepest in early spring – and see right to the bottom, a distance of less than a metre. All in all, I was disappointed. It was clear that without considerable renovation there was no way we could swim in its silty depths. And its nearly treeless setting was nothing like the sylvan oasis I longed for. But as the months passed through that first summer and fall, a funny thing began to happen. I became an avid spectator, witness to an annual spectacle: the unfolding life cycle of a pond. And gradually my disappointment gave way to fascination as I began to look beneath the surface and recognize the pond as the wondrous, life-sustaining universe that it is.

Ponds, even those of modest proportions like mine, are not only flourishing self-contained ecosystems – a closed circle of interdependent flora and fauna – they are also key elements in the bigger environmental picture, nurturing a wealth of genetic diversity whose preservation is critical to the health of the planet. As well, ponds, and the wetlands they support, play a key role in local flood control. As nature’s water purifiers, they help maintain the quality and quantity of groundwater, so their health and proliferation are integral to life itself. Perhaps just as important, ponds, whether they are shallow pools of standing water or larger lake-like bodies, are a ceaseless source of pleasure to the observant naturalist; they waken slowly in spring, teem with life in summer, gradually die in fall and endure winter’s icy sleep as the cycle begins again.

It sounds like the best of all possible worlds. But, alas, there is trouble in paradise, because Ontario was once a lot wetter than it is now. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources, before European settlement, southern Ontario had more than 2.3 million hectares of wetlands and ponds. Today, only 12 percent remain. The average wetland loss across Ontario is 70 percent. In the southwestern part of the province, the agricultural belt, the loss is as high as 90 percent. Dufferin County, where we live, has lost from 40 to 60 percent of its original wetlands, according to the Barrie office of Ducks Unlimited Canada.

Were he alive today, Thoreau, whose Walden Pond was actually a small lake set in a tract of virgin forest, would probably be shocked to see how the intervening centuries of human settlement have transformed the landscape in this corner of eastern North America, a part of the world that was once not so different from his native Massachusetts. Today, after deforestation and years of cultivation and drainage, our small pond is all that remains of a once mighty river that ran through our now arid farm fields.

The loss of wetlands in Ontario is alarming for many reasons, not least of all because they are home to countless species of plants and wildlife. The continuing destruction of vital habitat is a real threat to the genetic diversity of our environment. According to the Global 2000 Report to the President, released in 1981 by the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, 500 species and subspecies of flora and fauna had become extinct in North America since the Puritans arrived. And the losses escalated dramatically in the latter part of the 20th century because of the deliberate drainage of wetlands and ponds for agricultural, industrial and residential purposes. The report estimated that by 2000 another species would disappear with every single hour that passed.

In Ontario, 183 species of plants and wildlife are on the province’s list of species at risk. Many, like the Fowler’s toad, live full-time in ponds and wetlands. Others, like the lesser scaup, use them as breeding grounds for part of the year. According to Mike Williams, a conservation specialist with Ducks Unlimited Canada, wetlands support 142 species of birds, 53 species of fish, 20 mammals, 19 amphibians and reptiles, 350 species of plants and innumerable insects.

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