By Steve Waller
I cherish the calm days when I can get out on Long Pond in Centerville in the canoe while the sun is high. I can see the fish and bottom vegetation very well, down ten feet or more. Paddling along in the springtime, I see lots of six-inch bass, often spooked by my paddle. I scared up a school of small young bass at the west end of the pond, near where I recently saw a school of adult herring. The floating pondweed patches in the shallow areas are the largest I have seen in years. The water strider insects, who nearly covered the pond surface a few weeks ago, are now almost absent. I saw a monster snapper turtle at the northeast corner of the Pond. He was floating and eating bottom vegetation in a shallow area, and disappeared when I investigated. He is at least twenty-four inches across his carapace, which is the maximum size listed in online descriptions.
We have not seen any river otters this year, but the muskrats left a big pile of freshwater mussel shells off the end of our herring run. Last winter they piled up the shells on the edge of the ice. I’ve watched a muskrat dive and come back with a mussel, over and over. The muskrat we see most often seems to have a nest down the herring run. A larger one I see rarely seems to have a second nest under an abandoned wooden dock in the woods, across on the north shore. Yesterday one of our muskrats was swimming near me. He dove, and I assumed he was avoiding me. Instead, he came up near me and started swimming on a collision course with the bow of my canoe. When he was only a few feet away, he recovered and dove again. He had a mouth full of pond grass, which had blocked his forward view.
We have seen a great blue heron several times near our herring run, but he is not on the pond most days. We almost always have ospreys, usually two at a time, soaring and diving. They also don’t let me get very close to them, even when eating high in a pondside tree. The mergansers and the cormorant are also very shy, but I can get within five yards of the big Canada geese at times.
As I come back to our shore, I can see a black-crowned night heron sitting right where I need to land. He was easily spooked, as I have inadvertently done other times in other spots. Sorry to be so assertive, sir.
For more ideas about how to save your pond, go to State of the Waters Action Plan.
And remember, always check with your local conservation office before undertaking any projects around a pond so that you don’t run afoul of local and state wetlands protection regulations.
Pond Stories are a collection of writings and other media from Cape Codders and visitors who love the almost 1,000 local ponds that dot the Cape. We hope this collection of stories awakens your inner environmentalist to think deeper about our human impacts to these unique bodies of water.
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