Assisted Evolution

Sadly, I stand as a murderer today. I was filling up our backyard pond by hose yesterday because the auto-fill function has been broken for months. Perhaps today it will be fixed because Roger, my plumbing-capable nephew, is coming over to take another water-based disaster out of my life and far, far away: a miserable, mountainous mistake of a portable (hardly) spa). As happens so frequently, I stood on the patio for quite a long time, distracted by nothing in particular. The water lapping my shoes where I stood staring at the new leaves on the bottle trees startled me back to garden duty and I ran to turn off the spigot. Dozens of tiny tadpoles were swimming frantically in the ¼” halo of water skimming the concrete patio that overhangs the pond. Wondering where they’d come from—there’d never been anything but algae in that pond before—I swept those that I could back into the pond with a broom I’d left out. I hoped the tads would sink, but they were pulled back with the overflow returning to the concrete. I ran into the house, grabbed a soup pot from the kitchen and bailed water by the gallon onto the nearby plants. I realized tadpoles were raining down onto the lilies with every overturned potful. I ran a second time into the kitchen for a colander to fit over the pot rim, but the one handy had holes too large. My crashing and banging around in the cabinets woke my husband, Marc, from a summer nap but I triumphantly hauled out a sieve from over the stove. I rushed out the French doors a second time, immediately slipped on the wet cement patio and went down hard on one knee. Marc tried  to get me into the house for some ice and an explanation, but I still hoped to avoid a mass extermination. I limped back to the pond to pour pot after pot of water over the sieve held steady between my feet, trying to balance speed with force so fewer tadpoles were transported airborne to an uncertain fate. 

There were many unfortunate victims in the end, some who perished on the plants or fried on the concrete, others who were found later stuck on my person like short-tailed beauty marks, but I believe those I rescued (after admittedly introducing them to peril) number at least fifty. A few of the survivors will go home later today with Roger, bound for great-niece Emily’s brand new amphibian habitat. I’m sure they will thrive. We’re such an ecology-minded family.