![]() ![]() ![]() It’s as if that long-ago ice willed us the gift of water. They are quick with streams, marshes and ponds, and an abundance of seasonal pools. Tending east, it left kettle holes, sculpted ridges, rocks the size of boxcars, and hollows of clay and moraine. Here in the northernmost corner of the Northeast, a wedge of glacial ice a mile high reached its heft about 20,000 years ago. How would we know that they needed our protection if all we saw were the waves? These unprepossessing pools hide much of that kinetic energy below the surface. ![]() As springtime ponds dry out, they can look like shallow mudholes, and when they are at the height of activity in the spring and early summer, with hundreds of lives in their warming, diminishing waters, people walking through the forest often pass them by with hardly a notice. We lose landscapes and species when we don’t understand and protect all the parts that make them whole. Fish can’t survive a dry-out, which means that the larvae of frogs, salamanders, all sorts of insects, and more, get a better chance to grow up. This is an essential quality of a vernal pool. As the season heats and spring rains end, they lose water to evaporation and to the roots of the surrounding trees and bushes. They are small, just a few feet deep, and often strung along the forest floor like reverse archipelagoes. Vernal pools depend primarily on rainwater and the runoff from the forest uplands. The day was late in spring, a warm afternoon, and the water in the pool had already begun to contract. This shallow saucer of water was a vernal pool. It was sunlight, not fire, shining from an opening in the trees where a small pool bounced the light back into the air. Up ahead a glow looked as if a fire had been struck in a patch of forest duff. I followed a path made soft by years of fallen needles through a hemlock forest. ![]()
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