As I head out to the pond with Max…thought I would post a bit of a flash back. I found a wee video in my archive, that I had made in 2011, the first year I began picking litter at this location and got into the ritual of circling the pond. Beneath the video, some photographs taken during the past week.
The drainage of the pond began and the people I spoke with promised that lots of volume would be left for the healthy fledging of the young birds. The project was stopped for a day so that the biologist who worked for the contractor could assess my concerns regarding the nests and the fledge. Readers, look at the following photographs and tell me about volume.
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
It does look considerably smaller! But I’m impressed that you got them to stop to have a biologist look at it. Now it would be nice to hear what the biologist thinks of the state of the pond.
He talked to me personally because I told the manager of the Construction project that I was going to the media if I didn’t hear from him by end of day. He had decided that the nesting was over. (I knew that) and that the birds that remained at the time were old enough to fledge. (Disagreed, as I watched and archived every single family of waterfowl.) It was under the advisement of the biologists (who are hired by the company) that the volume was determined. The birds that needed to relocate had to cross railway track to other water…or across traffic of 22X or get to my side of the fence. Mammals were, of course, impacted as well. I’ve just now seen multiple locations of coyote scat, so I know that the coyotes, usually with a den on the other side of the fence, have come to the more people-traveled pathway.
I’ve now had the chance to speak to one of the people studying Calgary’s wild canine populations, the other night at Esker and she told me that the SE does not have the population any more that the NW has.