Oasis turned Muckish
I haven’t kept you up to date, my mostly anonymous readers. The lovely spacious clean safe pond Bella and Buzz have found, where they finally managed to have a surviving brood of 6 (the two banished females have seemingly gone on to look for more hospitable conditions), where William led me to look for them there, after I told them to dodge the Grist Mill Pond (snapping turtles, Heron, Invasive Water Chestnut, not a good place to live)?
Tuesday, after a lovely visit, I get back to my car and there’s a cop standing beside it. “Am I in trouble?” I ask. He tells me I can’t be in there. I tell him I see people walking their dogs in there every day. He tells me he knows. I say, “They are doing it illegally then?” “Yes,” he says (I should call the cops on *them*! No leash law in Sudbury, the big ass dogs with their giant heads come right down to the water’s edge and nose around in my bags and the owners just smile and don’t give a flying fig that the swans and I are apopletic). I show him my official Hop Brook Protection Assoc. bag, I tell him I’m monitoring the Water Chestnut conundrum on the pond (no mention of swans, many have strong feelings about their being an “Invasive Species”, though the never asked to be brought to this country). He asks, in a polite way, if they pay me for this work and no, I tell him I volunteer (though I do pay my dues to the organization). He says I must get a letter stating I can park at the gate. From whom? He says something about the owners of the pond. I ask him, truly curious now, who *does* own this pond. “I have no idea”, he says (I just know you can’t be here). I thank him for this strange new information.
I tell the story on FB, and a friend uses an unfamiliar expression, “Someone dropped a dime on you.” I was just starting to calm down and that got me riled up again. Who would actually, on purpose, report me to the police? For doing what? Picking up trash and fishing line and making the pond prettier? Do they call the cops on the fishing folks who leave their lures in the water for the birds to get hooked on?
The new board of the Hop Brook folks seem to want the old board to kinda fall quietly into the pond and never be seen again, or I would contact the president. I am friends with the founder, and she has contacts and info and she’s speaking on my behalf but really, no wonder I like birds more than people.
So that’s my story, and here are some pictures, and the take away is: no good deed goes unpunished.
