video can be found HERE!
It was a mild and overcast today at the Pond. The breeze was quite calm and the air was a balmy 59 degrees – balmy, that is, for Homecoming weekend, rather a chilly time in the past few years. I had a borrowed video camera in hand and set out to capture a basic tour of the site and its environs for a video blog entry. The following is a written interpretation thereof that I hope will explicate some of the features I have been describing, up until now, in writing alone.
I moved first to get some shots of the two mallards patrolling the mostly-glassy pond surface. Today I identified both a male and female mallard – until today I cannot remember having seen a male mallard on the pond. The difference is most apparent in the plumage. The male is largely white with stripes of black and brown on his body and a dark green on his head to attract attention during mating. The female has more mottled plumage, she is brown and grey throughout, that presumably better hides her from predators. The difference is most apparent when they dive for food and the male shows his white underbelly to the sky for a few seconds. Here I have captured them from two angles, the first looking east from the west bank and the second looking north from the south bank. The first segment ends with a look at the huge red maple at the north end of the pond which has been leafless longer than any of the trees at the site.
I progress counter-clockwise around the pond from there, and the next few seconds of footage show the grove of tall white pines from the south bank where they stand. The white marble walls of the Clark’s permanent collection gallery can be seen adjacent to the pines, as well as a small parking area. The white building to the west is the Williamstown Art Conservation building which stands between Wall’s Pond and Stone Hill. The conservation building is usually responsible for most of the ambient light and noise at the site, especially at night, but today its nearly ubiquitous mechanical hum are absent.
At about a minute and a half I moved into the bordering vegetation on the southeast bank to show a small outflow cut into the grasses and weeds by excess water. The footing was soft here so I hesitated to go much further towards the water, but as the video pans across the far side of the pond, take notice of the “leaning” white pine in all its precarious glory. The frame lingers again on the white pines at the south end and then sweeps across the length of the pond. Next week will include a history of the site and some background information on past land use there – those pines are the tallest trees on the site, but it will be interesting if I can divine from photos and other evidence just how old they are and how long they have dominated the Wall’s Pond skyline.
The video turns next to the eastern meadow that buffers the backyards on South Street (the large brick building is Fort Hoosac, first-year art history graduate program housing and the site of my encounter with the hawk and the crows two weeks ago). The following shots again show the pond from the eastern edge. For reference, the area to the right of white pines and bare-branched sugar maples is what I have been calling, in past blogs, the “entrance” to the pond. The cow fence along the far side of the pond has also come into my entries in the past weeks. Populated with now-bare sugar maple, ash, and beech, this strip of woods was where my one close encounter with animal life came during my night visit to the site.
At around two minutes and thirty seconds, the camera turns to the thickest area of bordering vegetation around the outside of the pond. The plants in this area have browned considerably since I first saw them in full late-summer bloom, but they continue to provide a marshy barrier to the mowed and unmowed areas around the outside of the pond. The last shot was taken from the north end, panning south and east from the cow fence, across the whole of the pond, and ending at Fort Hoosac.