Urban Pond Margins

Pond margins should be places for bulrushes.  They should slope gently to aid emergent frogs and toads in their crawl to dry land. Moorhens should find platforms to build and ducks places to dabble.  Waterlilies should float, anchored in mud all winter long and expand and blossom in the long warm summers.  This is the idyllic picture of the countryside pond in the era before pesticides and fertilizer run-offs.

Sadly our urban ponds do not completely live up to the picture.  The ducks are there, sometimes the moorhens.  The waterlilies flower in summer and the bulrushes shed their fluffy heads in the winter.  But along one margin is an ever-increasing layer of empty plastic bottles and semi-inflated footballs.  

Now I have returned to logging on to social media, the metrics of Meta have clocked my interest in the impact of plastic on the environment.  I click on a video clip and see vast booms trawling the Pacific or Caribbean seas.  Enthusiastic volunteers clean clogged rivers in Indo-China.  Kind fishermen remove netting from entangled dolphins or release orcas and committed locals further up our Fylde Coast clear the flotsam and jetsam.

We do our bit, but only on the landward side with my husband's name as lead litter picker on the list.  We, by which I usually mean hubby, push in to undergrowth and extract squashed, tossed beer cans, vodka bottles, plastic water bottles.  But we cannot and should not tackle the pond, it is outside our guidelines and remit.

We once rescued a straying duckling at the entrance to our road.  It was captured in a dive by my husband and carried in a corduroy cap by me back to the (relative) safety of the pond, cheeping as I walked.  It swam, still cheeping, towards the other ducks as we encouraged it down the (relatively) clean side of the slope.