Life springs eternal

Amphibian pool one year later

Drainage.  It's something I never gave much thought to until I became the caretaker of a hardwood rainforest and Ohio River Basin watershed.

Water is in abundance here.  It falls from the sky in liquid and frozen form in large quantities throughout the year (we get about 40 inches per year, which is on par with Washington state), and it consistently or spontaneously bubbles up from the ground in various spots on virtually every acre of our property.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with all this water.  On one hand, its a blessing to have this vital natural resource at our beck and call.  Our drinking water comes from a very reliable spring about 100 feet downhill from our house.  Springs around the property create gorgeous babbling brooks and waterfalls, and springs feed 2 creeks that keep our pond full year round.

On the other hand, all the water coursing its way throughout our property means that our landscape and ecosystems are constantly in flux.  A new spring creates a new brook that washes out a part of our driveway.  Or a tree branch falls into a creek so the water redirects itself into a meadow which now becomes a marsh. Or a torrential rain soaks the ground so much so that a 50-year-old White Pine just floats out of the ground by its roots.  Our water's very mission is to ultimately make its way to the Gulf of Mexico...and to take tiny bits of our land and redeposit it in various other places along its journey.

Northern Green Frog egg mass

So in our effort to put some of our land back where we like it, we rented an excavator, dug out a perpetually soggy area, and built a retention pond. Our primary goal was to construct what's known as a silt pond...an area that would capture much of the Spring runoff and slow it down before all the water and silt that comes along with it can wash into the main pond. But an added (and more rewarding) benefit to all this digging was to also create a separate little pool that might serve as a spawning area for frogs or salamanders.  Not more than a week later, we had this! 

Northern Green Frog

And a month later, we had this!

So when I get to grumbling about the muddy bogs on the trails or having to dig out one of our many diversion ditches, I remind myself that all this water literally gives life to thousands of wild species, to one domesticated one (Roscoe), and to two lowly humans who, without this abundance of water, would be living a very boring existence in the suburbs.