H2O's Backyard Residency

Today, before spring takes over, a reach back into winter to offer up a pictorial paean to the most creative molecule on earth, H2O, which here uses the minipond in the backyard to craft its endless permutations of beauty.

One day the pond looks like this, with a curious granular form of snow fallen on dark ice.

The next brings melting and reconfiguring into new hues and patterns.

The variety in the patterns owes in part to the underlying clay, which by absorbing the water very slowly causes the ice to drop gracefully in terraces.

Air gets trapped underneath, changing its shape minute

to minute.

In the paved world out the front door, snow, sleet and ice are a burden to be grappled with, but around back, where there's no pavement to be kept clean, no place that needs to be gone to, water in all its forms acts as artist in residence, conducting workshops on wizardry in the backyard pond.

Patterns in a Backyard Pond

A backyard minipond serves as a canvas for nature's artwork in the winter. Embedded in the beauty is many a physics lesson: the rock that melts the ice above, the leaf that melts the ice below, the bubbles trapped beneath and within, and the forces at work in forming all those loops and squiggles.

The impulses of kids to walk on ice or try to break it are safely explored on a shallow minipond like this.

We were surprised to discover that beneath the ice was not water but air. After the ice forms, the water beneath continues to be absorbed into the underlying soil, leaving a gap.

Shad, Wood Ducks and a Reptile

I would love to report that shad are running in my minipond, which I dug where a small tributary of Harry's Brook once flowed, before my backyard was a backyard. The brook is connected to the Millstone River, which flows into the Raritan River, which empties into the ocean just south of Staten Island.

Who knows if shad ever made it up to my neighborhood, but the blooms of a solitary shadbush in the backyard tell me that somewhere the shad are running. The shrub is also called serviceberry, and will have delicious berries later in the season.

Migrating fish have lost my ecological address, but a lot of other wildlife have found it. Though the shad didn't make the walk up to my miniponds, I was surprised and flattered by a visit from a couple young wood ducks the other day. That was a first.

There was also a return visit from another wild creature who did make the walk, and whose presence doesn't so much flatter as cause the heart to flutter. Just beneath the reflection of trees on the water's surface, a reptilian presence soaked up some afternoon rays.


A snapping turtle, some 14 inches long, though who's going to try to measure. I thought he had left last year, but is back, bigger than before. We may take him for a short ride back down to the creek.