I’m not sure what I’ve been doing right but it has been yet another astonishingly beautiful visit to Wall’s Pond. I arrived at the site today a little before 3pm under perfectly clear, blue skies. It was a perfect 60 degrees with a mild northeast breeze that sprang up to a maximum of 2 or 3 mph, barely enough to knock the remaining leaves off the trees.
The last week has not been so idyllic, though, and since my last visit the wind and rain have totally defoliated the big red maple at the north of the pond and the two smaller trees right on the northeastern edge. The sugar maples at the entrance are bare on top now and only the leaves on the bottom quarter of the tree are left, yellow and dry, waiting to flutter the few feet to the ground at any moment. The vegetation around the pond’s edge looks similarly gaunt and desiccated today. Where there had been a late summer bloom of mugwort and sedge on my first and second visit is now a dry and graying strip of woody plant life, a shadow of its former glory. As I made my way around the pond I noticed several flooded areas at the boundary of the mowed grass and the strip of vegetation, an indication that last week’s rain still hasn’t drained or evaporated.
I haven’t seen the mallards in a few weeks, but I did witness a rather dramatic show of wildlife today, the excitement of which greatly surpasses the ducks’ relatively sedate afternoon feeding. In a huge red spruce across the meadow from the pond, on the Fort Hoosac property, a lone crow abdicated its perch overlooking the house for a moment, only to be usurped by a opportunistic raptor (my closest guess, from the shape of its tail and the white breast plumage, is that I saw a northern goshawk. The beak, however, seemed a bit too big for a goshawk, and from the Audobon guide I could not identify this bird with certainty. I seriously regret not bringing a camera along so as to exact a better identification.). The crow circled around and, discovering the treachery, began “cawing” incessantly. The crow gained some altitude and dived on the invading bird repeatedly, “cawing” with fervor, but to no avail. After a few minutes of this, the crow swooped off to the west, circling around a tree at the extreme northwest corner of the meadow and came back to the spruce with two more crows in tow. The three crows flew up over Fort Hoosac and, screeching all the way, dive-bombed the raptor who finally relented. The crows chased their quarry low over the meadow where I stood watching and didn’t let up until all four birds were well into the cover of the Clark West Woods.
After this drama played out I turned my focus to a tactile analysis of the pond and its environs. I knelt and ran my hand through the grass at my feet. It was supple and warm from the sun, with just a touch of lingering dew where the blades met the ground. Moving into the thick of the sedge and mugwort, careful not to sink in the soft puddles thereabouts, I felt the crackle of dead leaves and brittle stalks that had, only a few weeks ago, been so flexible that it was hard to pull off a stem to take with me. I continued around the south end, crunching through the masses of dead leaves, stopping now and then to grab handfuls and crush them even more, exposing the occasional wet spot or bed of soft pine needles. I swung around past the entrance again to test the water temperature under the big sugar maple where the shoreline is firmest. Without a thermometer I would guess that the water was in the mid to upper 50s – my benchmark being 20 summers of swimming in cold Atlantic water on Cape Cod.
Eager to get the crow vs. raptor episode down on paper, I took one more quick turn around the pond, stopping to take some audio recordings. On my way past the eastern meadow where I watched the crows drive off their competition I spotted an incredible sight: a lone Monarch butterfly alighting on the few remaining dandelions in the field.