Walking Around Water
If you were to come across a group of alien little creatures - some dancing through water like living snowflakes, others with slick black skin and brilliant spots of blue and orange, slithering beneath a watery surface - where would you think you were?
Would you guess a forest?
These “fairy shrimp” and salamanders are just some of the inhabitants of what are called vernal pools - ephemeral yet essential to the life of the northern woods.
And would you believe that you’ve probably seen one before?
One summer in undergrad, I was introduced to the magical old-growth forest of Baker Woodlot, part of the original land grant of Michigan State by a friend who invited me to picnic along its trail. After that, I kept coming back. One fall night, my buds and I challenged ourselves to circle its path under the thinnest of moonlight. Somehow, we did it. One guy - to go unnamed - squealed every time his arm grazed a bush.
When winter came, the branches of its titan old trees hushed a stillness over the land.
Then Spring arrived, and on my first walk after the melt, lost in the homecoming birdsong, I found that a length of trail was just swamped. I crept around the water on exposed logs which had been carefully arranged by people before me. At some point though, it became just a pond, impassable really, at least for my sneakers.
The following year, I found the same little swamp in the same damn place. Every Springtime since, I’ve avoided that spot in the Baker Woodlot. Until this year.
Image credit to Instagram user lumber.jackie
If you have walked enough among forests, you DEFINITELY have seen one. They grow in the Spring when meltwater and rain briefly collect in some basin in the woods. Like me, your working definition for these probably was something like “standing water” or a “sometimes-swamp”. You probably try to avoid them. But forest life as we know it might not be able to exist without them.
Vernal pools provide a habitat for certain species of frogs and tiny crustaceans like those fairy shrimp. In forests with vernal pools, the salamanders can outnumber many species of insects, which also live there. This sucks for us but literally means life for a lot of the forest food chain.
Vernal pools feed the animals that you might more readily recognize: ducks, herons, owls, warblers, turkeys, chickadees, turtles, and snakes. The creatures that you tell stories about after you see them or hear them along your walks. There’s plenty of food for all of them, thanks in no small part to the vernal pool.
This winter, after about a week of watching footage of those fairy shrimp and salamanders, it hit me. That “swamp” at the Woodlot might be one of these vernal pools.
And I found myself itching to run and see something that I spent years actively avoiding.
When the weather hit the 50s, I took Dipper, my Dachsund (or a chiweenie, we’re not sure), to head out and investigate. Eventually the dirt path turned dark and sloppy. Nothing too menacing, so I urged my pup ahead and angled toward the path’s edge. Just to avoid the worst of it.
We ducked through a few bushes. Almost immediately, we found ourselves surrounded by that magnificent, dismal swamp I remembered. “It can’t be that much farther to the end”, I thought. Or told the dog.
What I remember next is water seeping through my boot seams just like years before. Fewer and fewer logs to cross, the sign of more and more casual walkers giving up. Dipper had no idea what we were in for.
We got to a point where it felt like 80% of the surface around us was just water a few inches deep, not punting the extra depth your foot would sink into the surface underwater.
Dipper, his legs and belly black with mud, looked at me with immovable disgust.
At this point, the only thing worse than getting to the other side would have been going all the way back. A few large logs offered one last chance at a halfway respectable exit to the other side. But Dipper, who looked more like a chili dog now, was done walking.
I hoisted him up, and somehow tightroped that last 15 feet or so, not even able to look down at my feet. And we made it. I honestly couldn’t tell if what we had crossed was a vernal pool, or if there really is a scientific term for a “sometimes-swamp”.
Further along though, a curve in the trail revealed a huge, unmistakable vernal pool. Dipper could understand my excitement.
As the summer kicks in, late June or July, the water will dry out. It will leave telltale clues of its existence. Small foliage, vaguely pond-ish in its outline, different from the kinds of plants around it. Water lines on larger logs in the area.
And in the high heat of summer, when I go for a walk in the Woodlot again, I’ll cross the path where the pool used to be.
I’ll see not the relief of dry land, but a wonder that will return from the dead next Spring.
Thumbnail image credit to Instagram user elbaron.c
