A Morning Working at Buckingham Pond
Friday, October 28, 2016
Today was our annual fall community service day at school... over the years my advisees and I have worked at the Pine Bush, Five Rivers, several different Little League fields, the Bethlehem YMCA, the Albany Shaker Site, and probably several other places that I can no longer remember. For the last three years we've gone to Buckingham Pond, where we mostly rake and bag leaves - actually, today that was all we did, for three hours. We managed to fill between 60 and 70 bags of leaves and left the park with fewer fallen leaves piled up in the bushes and wooded areas along the edge of the pond (which is where the city tells its workers to blow the leaves... so that we can pull them back out and bag them up for hauling away.)
It's interesting how many ducks are hanging around, after so few being around during the summer. Monday night there was a female wood duck warbling away among the many mallards, and this morning there was a male there as well. A kingfisher even put in a brief appearance right after we arrived.
I suspect by tonight or tomorrow I'm going to wish I'd done more paddling this past summer - my arms, chest, and shoulders are definitely going to be feeling the effects of 3+ hours of raking and hauling bags full of wet leaves.
- JMH
