Pond Stories

My dad solved most of life’s problems out on a Cape pond fishing. Growing up alongside the textile factories in New Bedford, Massachusetts, his brushes with the natural world were few and far between. When my parents moved to the Cape and Shubael Pond in Marstons...

Here’s a pond in Cataumet, at the juncture of the Otis Rotary and the entrance to Joint Base Cape Cod. It’s a nameless pond, but not so small that it should be. In the summer it fills with water lily pads, and reeds, but in the winter, it freezes, presumably because...

When you think of Cape Cod, you generally envision a coastal shoreline of sandy beaches and ocean air. But did you know the Cape has almost 1,000 freshwater ponds? Ponds are a critical component of the Cape's environment and quality of life and they are at risk....

I live near a herring pond which will someday become tidal.  Right now, however, it only receives the herring which run up to it from Buzzards Bay in North Falmouth. It’s a picturesque place, has quite a few well separated houses around it and some public land as...

About a year ago, a handful of neighbors in the Hatchville section of Falmouth began talking about what was happening to our beloved Deep Pond: mats of weeds appearing at the water’s edge; murky, warmer water; fewer frogs and turtles.

Little did we know when we moved twenty- five years ago to the end of a long dead and street that we were steps away from this gem of a pond. We soon discovered it was very special in lots of ways, and in all seasons.

Thanks to Skye Gibson who serves on the board of the Red Lily Pond Project Association in Craigville and who wrote a book for children of all ages about the two ponds in Craigville, formally once a great pond. According to the Craigville Village website, the bodies of...

One summer I was invited to spend several days on Naushon Island, the almost mythical vacation home of the Forbes family, established in 1842 and located across the water from Woods Hole. I was on the lookout for turtles.

When I first started swimming in ponds, I was afraid of snapping turtle, and sure enough, on the shore of every pond on Cape Cod I encountered a teen-age boy whose job it was to scare me about the snapping turtles living in that particular pond.