Relative Something

The second time was the charm. Second day, that is. After failing to get a gasket to seat in so many tries that we lost count, Cyndie and I let our restart of the pond fountain pause overnight and came back with a new plan and a fresh start in the morning.

The trick that helped bring much quicker success was a lavish amount of Vaseline. Water is falling once again, and it’s a good thing, because it got down below freezing last night. I checked the pond first thing out the door to see if there were any icicles and found everything flowing just fine.

I was a little surprised to find our deck covered in white snowflakes this morning. Could it be because I did finally move some of the snow shovels from just inside a door to a storage hook further back? Or because I turned off the circuit breaker providing heat to the Ritchie waterer in the paddocks?

There was a thin layer of ice on the waterer this morning that I easily dispatched. The horses will never even notice that it was frozen.

The pond is on the verge of being swarmed with tadpoles, as soon as they start growing tails. It had Cyndie and me chuckling over the first year we found the pond filled with what looked like a plague-level quantity of the little swimmers, and she called the DNR with concerns that we might need to do something about it.

We always imagine what kind of smirk the person likely had as they explained that there was no worry that we were going to unleash a disaster on the neighboring ecological balance, because the tadpoles are near the bottom of the food chain of predator/prey relationships.

He told her that, beyond pretty much every possible predator feeding on tadpoles, they will even eat each other. Only about 0.1% survive to become mature frogs. There is no pressure from other fish in our little landscape pond, but I suspect our bird population takes full advantage of the food source.

At least we now have well-oxygenated falling water to help give the tadpoles a fighting chance of survival.

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