Nature is Never Spent

On Sunday, on my way back to the city from the farm, I stopped at my usual rest stop, the one with a pit toilet and two concrete picnic tables next to a shady creek. In the summer, I splashed around and swam in the creek a couple of times, and it's deliciously cool. The nicest thing, though, is that the water is so clear you can watch the fish and crawdads swimming and walking around. (I know I posted a crawdad photo here at least once.) Most of the fish are basically minnows, a few slightly larger fish that look like some kind of bream.

But this time, for some reason, I noticed a new one hiding in plain sight, all the way on the other side of the creek. It was among some rocks and under some overhanging leaves; I had spotted it moving, but the only way I could see it once it settled was to pick out its round fins, two on a side which were parallel to the bottom of the creek.

I may have gasped slightly. There's a kind of thrill when you spot something in the wild that you've never seen, especially something that you can't identify. Even if it turns out to be something common, it's a discovery.

Since I got back to civilization, I have failed to identify it. Even with my bigger camera, I could only get a couple of low-light, blurry photos, and I discovered with some annoyance that almost every freshwater fish identification guide for my region has been made in service to anglers, so they only include game fish and invasive nuisance fish. I'll keep looking, but in the meantime I made notes so I don't forget any details.

location: creek at rest stop
date: Sept 18, 2011
size: estimated 6 inches long, 1-1.5 inches wide at widest point
features: body more "horizontally flat" than "vertically flat" (able to hug the bottom of the stream); 4 wide, round-ish horizontal (parallel to stream bed) fins - 2 coming from each side - 1 pair close to the head and another identical pair an inch or so back; light body with broad black patches along its sides (not well-defined stripes, but not evenly mottled)
behavior: hiding among large rocks at edge of stream under some overhanging branches; did not move with a series of pebbles tossed near it, only darted out when a larger stone was lobbed very near its location; immediately sought cover among rocks again

A few weeks ago, the water in the goldfishes' pool turned green and cloudy with algae, which worried me. The water's always been clear before, even when there's silty stuff at the bottom. I don't know what happened -- too much trash dropped in the pool? (People can be dumbos.) Simply too much heat and sun too early in the season?

But a few days ago, it cleared up. I don't know if it was cleaned or treated, but my main concern was the fish, of course... who seem to have survived. Not only that, but yesterday when I went to look at them, I saw two tiny tiny baby goldfish fingerlings! One may actually have been a minnow. But one was clearly a goldfish, white body with a red head. (Two tiny to get in a photo, unfortunately.) If they survive, they'll greatly beat the odds, but I was happy to see that the goldfish population is still healthy enough to be having babies. :)

The pollen isn't as thick as the Dust Bowl yet, and we've been lucky to have periodic rains that have settled it and washed some of it away. But it's working up steam, to use an inept metaphor. It has to be washed off of windshields or you can't see well to drive, it collects in swirls and clumps on standing water, and it sifts into windows to form a yellow layer of dust on windowsills. It's both oak and pine, mostly.


In this picture it's the yellow line along the waterline of the pool.

Since I've shown a picture of "my" fish here, taken a few days ago, I'll send out a little bit of hope to the universe that they're doing okay. Today when I stopped in to the office, I noticed that the pool was drained for cleaning. I always worry when that happens that some of the goldfish won't survive the transition, or that one day the maintenance workers will just find it too much trouble to keep them alive at all.