After I had been studying the pond for a while, I began to become bored. “What is there to see?” I kept asking myself, “it’s all so terribly familiar.”
Water boatmen and pond skaters, thrushes and blackbirds, nettles and bracken: nothing remarkable. My childish longing for excitement was overwhelming.
“What I really want is a big, pink, magical fish! That would really be something to see!”
But, day-by-day, my dialogue with this very humble pond increased, becoming deeper in its understanding of the interrelationships of these mundane creatures and plants. I began to see how delightful this simplicity was in its wholeness, this self-supporting and self-creating eco-system. The water boatmen continued to row themselves around in their curious and exhausting fashion. The pond skaters danced upon the mirror-like surface of the water, shattering the reflections of the trees into beautiful concentric rings, distorting reality just for a moment. The thrushes and blackbirds raised their families whilst in competition for similar foods, sending out alarm calls all the while. The nettles and bracken proliferated, providing valuable biomass.
I did not need to see a big, pink, magical fish! This was magical.
And then one day my patience was rewarded. I found something wonderful: a fresh water shrimp, Gammarus gammarus. This tiny creature is one of the most reliable indicators of a high level of water purity.In fact, the fresh water shrimp was the big, pink, magical fish! I informed Fiona Milne, who is the Head Ranger of The National Trust for Scotland, and she was very pleased to have confirmation that the water of the pond was so pure. My presence at the pond provides her with valuable data that she and her overworked staff members do not have time to collect.
My daily presence was indeed paying dividends. On another occasion I visited the pond by myself, a chance for reflection on the wonderment that is the Old Forest on an enchanted evening. There is an eerie, dreamlike quality to this wood when on one’s own, I felt most strongly that humans are but minor players in a much grander plan. The light was beautiful, sun glancing through the trees from the northwest. The Old Forest’s roe buck, glowing red in the sunlight, met me on the path by the pond. We looked at one another, both appreciating the ordinary extraordinariness of our shared world. I smiled all the way home.