Spotlight on Middlebury Land Trust properties – June 2016

Send in your guess identifying the June “Can You Guess The Location?” mystery Middlebury Land Trust property. (Janine Sullivan-Wiley photo)

By JANINE SULLIVAN-WILEY

Congratulations to Howard West, the first person to correctly identify the May mystery photo as Fenn Pond. Also correct, and the first to respond to the online edition, was Rob Fenn, who has spent much of his life by this pond. He said the picture was taken from an unusual perspective, one that many don’t see. (That was the plan; the June location may be even harder to guess. You can scout possibilities on the Middlebury Land Trust [MLT] website at middleburylandtrust.org).

Here is a little background on Fenn’s Pond. It is part of a roughly triangular-shaped 6.3-acre parcel the land trust acquired in1970. Rob Fenn provided a lot of its very interesting history, much of it hockey-related – not a surprise to anyone who knows of his love for the sport.

The pond has an illustrious hockey history. Each winter, from about 1935-1950, the Middlebury Hockey Club set up a fully functioning hockey rink on this pond, complete with boards that were lag screwed right into the ice. The club painted lines on the ice and set up regulation-size hockey nets. Two strings of lights stretched between poles on Charcoal Avenue and Route 64, lighting up the rink for as many as 1,000 people who would come to watch the matches. A hat was passed to cover the costs. That kind of crowd for a rural venue is almost unimaginable now, but this was before TV was a major competitor for the night’s entertainment.

The rink’s location moved in 1950, when a bulldozer cleared a space to the west side of the pond, where the boards could be permanently attached to cedar posts. Each winter, a channel dug from the small brook that runs into the pond allowed water to fill the rink. Each spring, the rink was drained. That practice lasted into the early ’60s.

The pond itself was created around the turn of the 20th century from a swamp that was fed by two brooks. Route 64 did not yet bisect the area, which was simply lowland between farms. The Middlebury Land Improvement Group bought the property and turned it into a pond. But it was not the pond we see today: it was fairly shallow – Rob Fenn says it was about 3 feet deep – and fields bordered it except for the trees along Charcoal Avenue. Now those driving on Route 64 or walking on the greenway get a good view of the pond.

These days, the pond is deeper due to dredging (which has happened three times so far), and its residents have changed. It used to have fish called suckers, which had an odd-shaped mouth that made them nearly impossible to catch with a hook. The bullheads were bigger, catchable, and quite enough for a good meal.

At one point, decades ago, someone apparently dumped goldfish into the pond, and people could see them in the winter, glimmering brightly beneath the ice. They are now gone. The pond has long been a great place for turtles, many of which can still be seen there, the snapping turtles swimming in wait for an unwary duckling, the painted turtles sunning on the rocks. Shiners, crawfish and even freshwater clams find homes there.

The pond attracts a nice variety of birds, some of which find the frogs, small turtles and fish good to eat. If you visit, you might see a red-winged blackbird, great blue heron, cranes, geese, ducks and the usual small songbirds.

Few mammals make their homes there. Decades ago there were many muskrats, but these haven’t been seen in some time. Very rarely, an otter has been seen in the small brook that feeds the pond. That brook has shrunk dramatically over the past decades to about a third of its original size; it once was big enough to host brook trout but now has only the tiniest of fish. The frog population has shifted as well, with the once-plentiful bullfrogs now quite rare. The spring peepers remain, making their joyful din in the spring and early summer evenings.

The June mystery location may be the hardest yet to recognize. Hint: there is no pond but there is water in this parcel. As before, email your best guess to mbisubmit@gmail.com, and please put “Guess the location” in the subject line. If you missed any of the previous “Spotlight” articles, you can find them on the Bee’s website or its Facebook page. In July, we will name the correct email respondents; the first respondent is the winner.