Thompson Pond Preserve offers the walker and naturalist a satisfying diversity of habitats to explore. The yellow and blue-blazed trails that encircle the pond pass through mature black birch woods, with a witch hazel understory, the cool shades of hemlock forest, mixed hardwoods, red maple swamps and thickets of prickly ash near pondside stands of ostrich fern, with its graceful, tapering plumes. It is all second or third growth forest, but there is one tree that stands out among the rest: a massive red oak, the largest I can remember seeing, not far from where the trail skirts the farm field on the west side of the pond. This giant is easily six feet in diameter near its base, and dwarfs the surrounding trees like an elephant in a herd of small antelope. One can’t help wondering why this one tree, among all its peers that were felled for charcoal or firewood, or cleared for farming, was spared. What stories such a tree could tell us of the centuries it has passed here, if we knew how to listen!
It’s interesting how sometimes our attention is captured, in a place of expansive vistas, by small creatures going on with their lives right in front of our noses. Crossing one of the three boardwalks at the pond’s swampy southern end, I came face to face with a pair of bumblebees busily probing the bell-like blooms of highbush blueberries, each clinging to one flower after another with its forelegs and using its long tongue to sip the nectar at its base. Bumblebees, like the blueberry, are native to North America, and can feed upon, and thus pollinate, such flowers as these, too deep for the honeybee (introduced from Europe) to reach. As the air above swamp vibrated with the thrumming of their wings, I stood there, entranced, watching them closely, for they were at eye level, and too absorbed in their work to notice me. Somehow these ungainly insects seemed in that moment to distill all the vibrant life of the place, the sky-mirroring pond and its margins, like a rich tapestry embroidered with ferns, sedges, and wildflowers, framed by birches, maples, hickories, hornbeams and oaks, crisscrossed by the flights of birds and dragonflies. Maybe the give-and-take between bumblebee and blueberry, pollen and nectar in exchange for pollination, is emblematic of our own interdependence with wilderness. In preserving such irreplaceable places as Thompson Pond, we humans are also preserving something irreplaceable in ourselves, a wildness within.
The main entrance to Thompson Pond Preserve is on Lake Road in Pine Plains. Head south on Route 82 for 1/2 mile from Route 199 and turn right (west) onto Lake Road at the firehouse. Follow Lake Road for 1.6 miles to the trail head (main entrance); parking is on the road shoulder.
Richard Parisio is a lifelong naturalist, educator and writer. He currently leads field trips for school classes at Mohonk Preserve, teaches courses about John Burroughs and conducts tours of Slabsides and the John Burroughs Sanctuary for groups and individuals by request. Rich is New York State coordinator for River of Words, a national poetry and art program on the theme of watersheds, and teaches River of Words programs for school classes, grades K-12, by request. Contact Rich ([email protected]) with questions, comments, or suggestions for Nature at Your Doorstep.
