Gale’s Pond

One of the days my family were together in Michigan, we went to a local county park, Gale’s Pond. Our children used to think—and one of the younger ones asked this time—if it’s Daddy’s Pond! No, sorry; it’s named after a local family, and spelled differently.

There were a lot of redwinged blackbirds at the pond, but this was the only one I could get even a halfway good picture of. I love their song!

I learned something about cattails! Apparently, I never saw them at this stage before. The lower part is the female part of the flower, and develops into the sausage-like thing you see later in the year. The top part is the male part; it’s very spongy, and if you rub your hand over it you get a lot of pollen on your hand. The boys were getting it on their faces!

We took a family picture on this bench many years ago when we had, maybe, four children, so decided to take another. What a circus getting everyone to pose! And then, the light and shadows were too harsh, so it didn’t turn out well. Good memories, anyway!

Of course, my Mr. Intellectual had to show off how well he can shimmy up a tree with no branches.

“Take a picture of me!”

I’ve always loved standing on the road over the dam here.

These two found fishing hooks and bobbers caught on the trees and worked to untangle them.

We had fun finding Monarch butterfly caterpillars. We took five large ones home to watch them change, and found a tiny one on one of our leaves. We also found some eggs on the undersides of a few leaves—I’d never seen that before!

And then—our boys started seeing garter snakes! Some of them had been really hoping to see a snake in the wild in America, since we have no snakes in New Zealand. They thanked God that night for letting them see snakes, but now at least one of the boys is saying he doesn’t like snakes!

Within a couple of days, the caterpillars had all turned into chrysalises. We brought them with us to Ohio, so we’ll see after awhile if they survived the bumping around enroute.