Tadpole Story 4: Where Will They Go?

On August 20, there was a passing sprinkle. Not enough to register in the gauge, or to help at all, but enough to embolden the first mountain chorus frog to move from its leaf to the container edge.

Then it did a move worthy of Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

'

And just as desperate (Grant played an innocent man mistaken for a spy and relentlessly pursued by the FBI).

When the droplets dried up, I couldn't find the froglet. And I wondered where it had gone. Where could it go?  For those of you getting rain this summer, it's probably hard to imagine gardens and forest without a single damp spot in them. Rock-hard soil and everything limp, wilted, parched and fried. That's what's going on here. There is no water, anywhere, in the soil or the leaf litter or in the streambeds. Lakes, rivers and ponds, yes, there's still water there, but how is a frog the size of my pinky fingernail going to get to them from the top of a dry ridge? It is going to dry up and die as soon as it leaves the pool. I know it in my bones. And I know I have to do something about it.

If these things are going to start metamorphosing, I realize that I have to put them somewhere where they will have both a body of water and moist surrounds. I can't give them that on this sunbaked ridge. Once they're out of the pool, and instinct tells them to disperse, it's out of my hands. And, after months of heavy work and lots of expenditure on water, they are dead. 

You see, I've messed with everything. And messed it all up. The tadpoles would have died the first time the puddle dried up in May! But I couldn't let that happen. That puddle would have dried up ten times had I not been hauling water to it. So I made my own bed here by carrying tadpoles from May into mid August, when by all rights they should have long since returned to the soil. But I said no. And what I didn't know when I made the commitment was that the rains would stop completely, and there would be no water for them anywhere. Oops. Now what?

The fact that they hadn't metamorphosed in a normal time span (6-8 weeks) tells me that they somehow sensed that to leave the puddle would be to die. Why change into an air-breathing frog if there's still water here, and there's absolutely nowhere else to go? I lie awake at night, considering all the possibilities. Do they need to feel the wide swings in barometric pressure that accompany storm fronts? Do they need rain sluicing into the puddle to assure them that it's safe to leave? I don't know. I just know that their development had been arrested, and nothing was happening for them. And now that I've taken them in, they're changing, and I have to do something to meet them where they are. At the very least, I have to get myself out from under the need to continue caring for them.

The trees are dropping their leaves on August 20. It's so very sad. August, normally a time of wild abundance in insects and birds, is eerily still and silent. August has been canceled. We're going straight to October.

I can't let them keep dispersing into the desert, only to die, after three long months of toil.

They're so perfect; I owe them better.

 What a rotten pickle to be in! 

The only thing I can think to do is to take them to the beaver pond on Dean's Fork. 

The one whose dam had, for years, had been dynamited by a local jerk who didn't even own the land it was on, until he got a nice visit from the wildlife officer. A little bird tipped the officer. Only then did he finally quit destroying the beavers and their habitat, against the express wishes of the landowner. I feel a very strong sense of stewardship over this pond. 

I pour the three tadpole tubs slowly through a strainer to catch all the tadpoles.

They look so much bigger and stronger than they did when I brought them in nine days ago. 

Lots of strong hind legs on these gray tree frog tadpoles!

I found two dragonfly larvae (which had been feeding on the tadpoles!)--here's one of them

and one tiny froglet in training. I put it in a Tupperware so it wouldn't drown in all the sloshing, because once they crawl out, they have lungs and have to breathe air.

I poured everyone into a joint compound bucket, loaded them in the car, and headed for Dean's Fork. 

Curtis, who hates water, came down the steep bank to make sure Ma didn't fall into the pond. I'm not sure he'd have swum out to rescue me had I plunked in.

I cast a last long look at the pond that would finish the work I started in May with these tadpoles. Had I known what keeping them in water would entail over the next three  months, I'd have taken them straight to the beaver pond. But I had to learn the hard way, which seems to be the only way I learn.

I've spent the entire day gathering photos and videos, importing them, and writing up this experience, for you of course, but for me, too, so I have a record of it. I want my photos of different tadpoles and young froglets to be out there for people to refer to. I wanted to document the story of trying to keep a tadpole puddle going in an historic drought. I want to remember what it was like so I don't try anything like this again. 

Though I can’t manage to post on my blog more than once a month or so, writing up this foray into the frog world feels more like my real work than the stuff I do all day. It’s personal. It couldn’t be done by anyone but me. That’s the difference. 

Next time, if it ever rains again and if spring comes to this parched ridge, the first time the puddle dries down, I'll scoop the tadpoles up and take them straight to Dean's Fork.

Sure I will.

Postscript: After I wrote this, it got hot again, so hot I was glad the tadpoles were free in the beaver pond. It was as if the sky was trying to kill everything beneath it here on earth. I thought it couldn't get any drier, but it did. Despair doesn't quite describe how that felt. My friend and conservation hero Nancy Stranahan, also suffering for all her plant and wildlife friends through this horrible drought, read one of my posts about the drought, called me on the phone, and helped me get to that place of giving up. I had to let it go, and tell myself it likely wouldn't rain again until November. Just throw up my hands and say, OK, I'm going to keep watering, but I will not keep hoping it will rain. Weirdly, that helped. Giving up, expecting absolutely nothing, was the only thing that helped. 

I will always be grateful for Nancy's intervention. I picked up the pieces of my mind and got back to work. 

And then it began to rain again, in a tentative way, on Wednesday, August 28, at 6:23 PM. A great rushing sound came from the north and there was lightning and thunder and a downpour so sweet and so badly needed I nearly wept. But I laughed instead, like a lunatic. I walked around in the rain and lightning, unafraid, smelling the petrichor, until I was soaked. I splashed in tiny puddles. I raised my face to the sky and let it beat down on me. We got 0.4". On August 29 we got 0.6". And then on August 31, we were gifted with 1.2", and the leaves that had been furled came unfurled. The white snakeroot that was limp as Kleenex has burst into bloom. So has the mistflower. It's too late for the trees, most of which have yellowed and dropped their leaves, saving their energy for next spring. The ground is deep in yellow and brown leaves. I don't know which of them will make it through the winter. It looks like most of my spicebush has died, and many dogwoods. But you never know. Maybe they'll come back. There won't be any dogwood flowers next spring, that much I know.

It will take many more such rains to begin to catch up, but I rolled up several hundred feet of hose today, and with the hours I don't have to spend watering every evening, I did a three-day deep clean of my house, which had been like a neatly kept dust museum through the drought. I simply didn't have the energy to clean. It all went into watering and worrying, getting up the next day and doing it all over again.

Thank you for reading after this long hiatus. It's felt good to talk with you again. Even though, in the age of Facebook and Instagram, nobody comments on blogs any more, I appreciate your time, and I know you're out there.

Into the Arms of Dean's Fork

On this June morning, I woke before light, as I usually do, and lay in bed planning my day. I decided that the best thing I could do would be to walk down Dean's Fork with Curtis and celebrate the return of the beavers. Maybe I'd get some photos for this post! I hung the big rig over my shoulder and grabbed my binoculars, harnessed the cur to a belt around my waist, and off we went. 

The feeling I get when I walk down Dean's Fork is much like the one many do when passing through the doors of a church. I feel as though I am delivering myself and all my cares to a greater power. I feel it working on me the entire time I'm there. Discoveries await me, each time, and I can never anticipate what they might be. That's the deliciousness of being attuned to nature. It's subtle stuff. You have to look for it and be open to it. You can't go barging along talking or listening to music. You must let the only input be that of nature. That's when the magic happens.

Northern pearly-eye, my first of the season, June 15

I think of my visits there as "delivering myself into the arms of Dean's Fork." Because that's how it feels. Like I'm being wrapped up in something much bigger than me. Look at this beaver dam, in a sinuous Z, perfectly and powerfully engineered to hold back who knows how many hundreds or thousands of tons of rainwater. The dam itself is easily 20' high. It was made by two rodents only of the materials they could transport in their teeth and arms. Think about that. The intelligence, the design of it all. It takes my breath away. It is as precious to me as any architectural work of man, because what work of man creates habitat for so many other creatures?  Humans transform habitat, but rarely for the benefit of other life forms than humans. Concrete and glass are notoriously unkind to winged ones. Here, in this perfect construction site, the waters teem with life, and they're a magnet for wildlife you'd never find otherwise. 

I didn't see a heron on this joyful trip, but I saw where the shitepoke sat.

And shat.

I smiled so big, picturing a great blue heron, all angles and spikes, delivering the evidence of its visit to the road below. 

That evidence, transient and nourishing, going back into the earth without a hitch. Unlike the evidence of human passage. What LOSER would dump his (losing) lottery tickets and beer cans in this sacred space? A loser, that's who. Only someone insensate to beauty could defile this place. 

In the muddy road just alongside the pond, some opossum tracks...

and the greater prize, some good clear river otter tracks. For now, they might be eating crayfish, but oh, when the fish come in! I thrill to think of fish rising to the surface in the evening.

And the greatest prize of all, my lottery win: a sighting of the engineers! I have to go pretty early in the morning or late in the evening to catch them. They're crepuscular. I was delighted to see the two interacting when I got there. They were grooming each other with tooth and claw. But so gently, no red. 

I have to think that the smaller animal (on shore) is a female, while the enormous dirigible is a male.

He gave me a direct stare, surely unaware that I had advocated on his behalf.

Eased into the water and swam as close as he dared.

And then, with a hugely satisfying kerPLOOOP, he clapped his flat tail against the water and dove deep.

I love that sound! It's like throwing a pumpkin in a pool! 

Though we'd had 3/4" of hard rain the night before, the stream crossings on the road were all absolutely fine. When the dam has been destroyed, they become impassable to foot traffic, unless you either want to wade barefoot or have the water come over your boot tops. But now, the dam holds back the flood, and that makes life easier for those who live on the road. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this but me?

Puddles on the road were another matter. We got through, but only just. Yes, that one is heart shaped. I love it because it's a frog factory, and because it keeps cars and many trucks from getting through. Less traffic is better, always. 

Curtis and I reached the Ironweed Festival grounds and looked back, having walked facing the light the whole way down. 

How beautiful it all is. I know that, now that the cattle are gone, it won't be open for very long. Already, groves of sycamores have started up, and they're taller than me. We must be ready for the change that inexorably comes. We have all had so much change of late. 

Oh, how the sky reflects in the creek. 

I can envision the day when this young sycamore will take my breath away. I hope I'm still here when it's big enough to do that.

I found Moneywort, in the primrose family (Lysimachia nummularia), growing in a wet ditch. I looked at the plant and turned it over in my hand and mind, and decided it was either a loosetrife or a primrose. I was happy to find it was a primrose! Love that plant taxonomy, now practically innate, kicking in as I puzzle. Carroll Williams' Plant Taxonomy course at Harvard was one of the best, most fun, and most useful I ever took. Plus, we drew!!

Down toward the end of the Ironweed (or Corn Salad) Festival Grounds, I found at least five pairs of song sparrows. I have a new appreciation for these birds, having raised one up from nothing this summer. I saw some fledglings about 10 days younger than mine, and smiled. I knew what their parents were dealing with. I was amazed how many breeding pairs were packed into that one old field. I envisioned setting up a study to map their territories, then discarded the idea. I study birds all the time, but not in that way. No netting, no banding, no blood samples. 

If song sparrows have a heaven, this is it.

Can you spot the phoebe in his element? 

We got to the end of the line with a creek crossing my boots couldn't handle. This is the face Curtis gave me when I told him we had to turn back.

He'd have happily gone on for miles more.

As it is, it's a four-mile walk, round trip. I do it happily, though it's all downhill on the way down, and uphill going back. What helps is that the light is beautiful on the way back, because the sun is behind me.

It was a good day for large rodents.

Woodchucks, genus Marmota, are in the family Sciuridae, the squirrels. That makes sense. 

They are not so very different. Beavers (Castor canadensis) are in the family Castoridae, the rodent suborder Castorimorpha, along with gophers, kangaroo rats and pocket mice. That is one heck of a mouse.

A mouse with skills. Here's its house, with an underwater entrance and chambers lined with fresh dry grass inside. 

Beavers, and the habitat they create, are miracles. I can't think of another animal that so profoundly impacts the surrounding habitat, in such delightful ways. Water is precious; water is life, and this pond bursts with both. I saw a newly-fledged belted kingfisher trying the waters on my next to last visit. Wood ducks almost always squeal and scurry away, taking a little piece of my anxious heart with them when they do. Into the arms of Dean's I go, and I come home changed for the better.

Return of the Peepers

I have made my way down to Dean's Fork, tracking animals all the way. As I hit the dirt road I hear from upstream an enormous chorus of spring peepers, so many that I can hardly believe my ears. So instead of turning downstream, as I have for the last six months, I head up. 

I head toward the beaver pond, which had all but dried up when I saw it last fall. 

And what a sight met my wondering eyes. The pond was full. As full as I'd ever seen it. 

The dam had been completely rebuilt to its original 2009 height, with an interesting angle to it that I'd not seen before. I stood and gaped. 

I let my eyes run over that miraculous expanse of water. Sweet, deep, muddy water. 

And I heard a splash and gurgle.

And the architect of it all, the higher intelligence I so adore, swam slowly toward me. 

I stood behind some trees, trying to melt into them, but it was clear he saw me.  His head was high. His nose was searching for my scent.

And it was equally clear he did not fear me. Twice he made a circuit of the pond, passing close, looking right at me.

It was an honor I neither expected nor deserved, but I gave thanks just the same.

And whispered to him not to be so trusting of men.

The beaver was back. The beaver? I don't know. A beaver was back. And the dam had been completely restored. I could not believe it.

 How I wish I could impart just a molecule of the wonder and joy Dean's Fork brings me, to the soulless loser who destroyed that beaver dam.  But I know that there is no redemption for one so callous. You might as well appeal to a tornado to spare something in its path.  And, I'm told by our wildlife officer, there's no legal recourse when no law enforcement agent is present to witness his vandalism. To see it all come back despite his worst attempt has been a fragile, trembling victory. I will never again be able to visit without a preamble of anguish, for wondering whether he'd have gotten to it first.  Loving this place as deeply as I do, knowing that dreck-for-brains is bent on its destruction, is like living with a big old boot hanging by a frayed thread over your head, ready to drop at any time.

Extend that metaphor, now, to include the men in white pickups; the dump trucks and tankers and flatbeds strapped tight with pipe that now hurtle along our winding roads: the oil and gas development going on in our shale-rich region. Last summer, all Dean's Fork was strung with orange spaghetti--extension cords running to seismic testing instrumentation for its entire 3.5 mile length. For all I know, they've marked off some or all of it for destruction and drilling. I suppose I could find out, but I don't want to know. At this point, knowing might kill me. I just don't want to know. 

I've spent four solid days writing this series of posts. Along with "They're Drilling My Forest," they have been among the most difficult I've ever had to write.  But I have to write them. I won't get another deep breath if I don't. The story of the Dean's Fork beaver pond has become a song cycle for me. I feel I have to tell it all--the beautiful, the magical, the mystical and the horrible--to try to convey what this place means to me. What it means to live in tired old, lovely old, beat up old Appalachian Ohio at the height of its seventh oil exploration boom. What it means to be deeply invested in a place whose inestimable beauty and diversity might not survive the new and more avid attentions of the men in white trucks. Compared to the destructive power of Protege Energy, the creep who blew up this beaver dam is a mosquito.

Listen to those wood thrushes sing, and replace that with the roar of a drill rig. That's what we're up against.

 My complex relationship with this place has been an object lesson to cherish the moment and the setting and the people around me right now, for I can never know when all will be brought to nothing. I have no steadying constant in my life I can rely on to sustain me save the love of the land. One can only draw so much strength from within. There must be input, and I get that from the land.

Is it any wonder I sing out day after day, season after season, about all that is still here, alive, thriving, and good? 

I sing like a goddamned bird.

 Like a heavenly chorus of spring peepers. Who better to celebrate the return of light and life, leaf and love, and water, life-giving water, than these permeable beings** of water, mud and air?

            

**A poem given to me by my lovely and loving friend Donna. I've borrowed Ms. Tibbett's word, because it's perfect. As is this poem, perfect for this post, which is all about wonder at the fact that, despite humanity's best efforts to crush them, spring peepers and beavers are

Still Here Softened by a glass or two of Cabernet, I left my neighbors’ crowded table, our bursts of laughter, and dour conversation about man and his dangerous antics in our only world, and went to the kitchen for more bread. There, through the window, a sweep of damp air and wild spring calls of peepers and wood frogs rushed in like the Holy Ghost and made me pause. Their piercing chorus of voices mixed into such a deep soup of sound that one frog was indistinguishable from another. And for one long moment I was held there in the world’s big hands, and everything that mattered was evening with its early, scattered stars, the fragile smell of daffodils and boggy water, and the mating calls of a population of those finely-tuned, permeable animals (indicators of the Earth’s well-being) so much older than we are, that have survived ice ages and the shifting of continental plates, but are now disappearing — though still here thriving in woods beyond my neighbor’s lawn in this hollow where we are all clinging to the slippery edge of wildness, where I was allowed a rush of such sweetness and grief, those fraternal twins who are born in us again and again, though perhaps not forever, singing whether or not we listen. Elizabeth Tibbetts First published in the Beloit Poetry Journal As printed in Science and Conservation of Vernal Pools in Northeastern North America: Ecology and Conservation of Seasonal Wetlands in Northeastern North America, by Aram J. K. Calhoun, August 2007

Animal Magic on Dean's Fork

By July 13, 2016, the Canada lilies I'd never known were there burst into bloom on the banks of the  pond. Blue campanula set them off nicely. I left a note on the door of the sometime inhabitants of the little solar-powered cabin nearby, to go look for these ephemeral floral treats. I like doing stuff like that, shining a little light into the woods for others to see. 

Wild bergamot in two colors, July 13, 2016

And who could forget July 24, 2016, my birthday, when I was showered with gifts by my favorite dirt road? I swear, it seemed all the animals came out to wish me well!  I'll admit that it does help to walk there at dusk, when they're coming out anyway.

Twin bucks, July 24, 2016. Gosh, ya think they're brothers?

One of the twins has better judgement. Can you guess which one?

The most beautiful skunk came out to show me his pink toes and nose.  He rumbled right up the road toward us. We had to climb a bank to get out of his way!

I recognized him from early morning skunk watchings I'd been conducting. There were three skunks living down there last summer, and I met them all several times. Skunks are a behavior-watcher's ideal animal, because each one is as distinct in markings as a smelly lil' snowflake.

But the best birthday present of all was waiting down in the gloaming, just as it was getting dark. My Hannah, the Loose Appaloosa, an apparition in the dusk.

And this evening, the last time I saw Hannah, she was more beautiful and kind to me than ever. I didn't know it was the last time. I simply treasured it, like all the other times I met up with her, and loved on her. 

She's gone on, I'm told, to live elsewhere,  about two hours away, with other horse friends. I miss her more than I can say.

July 24, 2016.

From that same day, a wood thrush concerto that now, in early April, seems otherworldly, unbelievably rich. It's hard to believe they'll be back soon and tuning their flutes in a matter of a week or two. This video was taken just below the dam, along a low wet meadow that's full of Joe-Pye weed and ironweed in August. Here it is in late July, with the thrushes spinning their silvery songs across the road.

By September  28, 2016, after a lush wonderful start and a hideously dry late summer, the pond had all but dried up. It was sad, but inevitable, because the half-dam the beaver had built didn't set back enough water to last through the drought. 

At least this drying out was gradual, not the cataclysm of September 1, 2014. I resigned myself to watching this little ecosystem briefly flourish, be destroyed, creep back to a shadow of its former glory, dry up...whatever fate and that lawless jackass brought, I'd be there to witness. Dean's Fork and I are too intertwined for me to turn away from it; its riches are so varied and precious I literally starve without them. Since I first started walking this road in perhaps 2007, it has become essential to my well-being. It is my habitat, in some ways even more than my home and gardens are. When I am there, I have complete thoughts; I write songs; I leave my corporeal body and commune with the animals; I connect to who I really am.