Tag Archives: pond

The Drought of 2025

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As I write this it’s raining. It’s pouring. It’s raining cats and dogs and pouring buckets and falling in sheets. And we are glad of it. The rivers and brooks and ponds and wells are finally filling after the longest drought anyone can recall. All summer and into the fall the ground was parched. Thirsty plants were slow to grow, and water levels in rivers and ponds and wells kept dropping. One by one, ponds, brooks, and wells went dry.

There were forest fires on the mainland and the woods were tinder dry all over the province. At the end of July the government declared a province-wide fire ban, with $25,000 fines for numbskulls who ignored the ban. A few days later the province went a step further and closed the woods. No hiking, no biking, no ATVs allowed in the forest. People working in the woods required permits.

The woods ban did affect some tourism operators and disappoint keen hikers. Others were just whinging about their personal rights and freedoms. But many of us living in the woods were glad of the ban. One hundred people can go in the woods and cause no harm, but it only takes one idiot to toss a butt or start a campfire that can destroy our forests, our homes, even our very selves. I could still walk around on my own forested property, but why would I? Why risk being stranded up on the highland slopes if a fire broke out?

Besides, for me summer in Cape Breton is beach season. The silver lining in the lack of rain clouds was a grand beach season. Hot, sunny weather and warm ocean waters day after day. Nova Scotia is blessed with miles of beaches, for walking and swimming and all manner of watery fun for us and our visitors. We are, after all, Canada’s Ocean Playground.

Playing in the ocean in Canada’s Ocean Playground.

But even at the beach we wished for rain. For overnight soakers, or even a post-tropical storm that would bring a drenching and move on, anything. But every forecast of rain fizzled to a drizzle. Now and then showers would bring 10 or 12 mm, but it was soaked up and burned off so quickly it seemed like a wet dream. Sometimes the rain came in thunderstorms – a terrifying forecast with the woods a tinderbox. More than once, I gathered a few important papers and piled them by the door, ready to grab if a nearby tree ignited and I had to flee in the middle of the night.

Apparently one of those lightning strikes did find a target, not far from my place. I was visiting friends when we got word of forest fire on our shore. When fire trucks roared by, sirens screaming, I decided to hightail it home. I passed by where the fire trucks had pulled up and saw smoke billowing out of the woods. It was 3-4 kms north of here. Once again, I piled essentials near to hand and waited. But we were lucky – our local firefighters managed to douse the blaze, which had been smouldering for some time.Thank you firefighters! We so appreciate your work and dedication.

So this drought has been historic, one for the record books. I’m from Calgary, from a dry prairie climate where droughts are part of the normal cycle. But lately it seems that Calgary keeps flooding while both east and west coasts suffer droughts. It’s all topsy turvy as the climate changes and there in no ‘normal’ anymore.

L’il Pond Vanishes

As I wrote in Ups and Downs in the Holler, the water level in L’il Pond rises and falls with the season. In spring it can rise so high with snow melt and rain that it floods into the forest. Over the summer it subsides, a few inches a day, until it stabilizes at the local water-table level. Sometimes there is enough water to go Swimming with Frogs or drift around in a dinghy. Other summers the water is grungy and shallow and only fit for frogs and other aquatic flora and fauna.

Shallow parts of the pond routinely dry out and I’ve transported tadpoles, stranded in a shrinking pool, to deeper water so they have a chance to metamorphose, as I described in Frogs, Globs, and Pollywogs. As summer goes on the lilies grow up, the water drops down until the pond is covered in lily pads – hence L’il Pond, aka Lily Pond.

So the pond almost always gets low in the summer but it very seldom dries out completely. And yet it dried out by mid-September last year, the first time since I moved into my cabin ten years earlier. And then along came 2025 – and blew all the records out of the water.

The pond on August 8th, 2025, on the left, compared to August 7th, 2021, a more typical year.

This year the pond dried out in August. And it stayed dry, all though September and October. Even when it does dry out, it’s usually muddy – the kind of mud that could suck you in and never let you go. But this year even the mud dried out until it cracked. I could walk right out to the deepest section of the pond.

Left: Coyote track in the cracked mud. Right: I’m standing in the deepest part of the pond in October.

Quite a difference from 2023, when it wouldn’t stop raining. By October the pond had flooded into the forest and I went kayaking among the trees. Or October 2006, when we paddled around on the pond and enjoyed the fall foliage.

Kayaking though the forest in October 2023 and paddling on the pond in October 2006.

Wee Brooks Falls Hike

There is a trail nearby that follows the Little River valley westward, ending at a fork where an unnamed brook meets Little River. My son and I dubbed it ‘Wee Brook’, to match the ‘Little River’ theme. If you cross Wee Brook and follow it upstream into a box canyon it leads to a waterfall. Wee Brook Falls reveals itself one section at a time as you climb upward, twisting this way and that as it tumbles down from a lake, high up on the highland plateau.

I have walked this trail dozens of times, but, as often as not, I don’t cross the brook and so don’t get to the waterfall. Crossing involves stepping on unstable river rocks that are slippy with moss and tend to tumble under your feet. And there is usually a wide gap of fast-running water to cross. I don’t want to ‘fill my boots’ with icy water, or worse, fall and twist a knee, turn an ankle or even smack my skull on a stone. So I err on the side of caution and instead walk upstream on the near side of the brook, until the slope becomes too steep to traverse.

But in mid-October, with the woods ban ended and the colours still blazing, it seemed the perfect time to get to the falls, with the rivers still so low. I walked for half an hour or so until the trail led me to the water at the fork where Wee Brook flows into Little River. And there I stopped – gobsmacked.

I expected the brook to be low, but I was staring at a bone-dry creekbed, just a jumble of river rocks. Even the Little River was mostly dry rockbed, with a narrow stream of shallow water on one side. In all my visits to this place over 22 years I’ve never seen the like.

Left: Looking downstream from the fork, after the brook flows into Little River.
Right: Looking upstream from the fork – Wee Brook is a dry rock bed.

So, no problem crossing, no boots required, every stone a stepping stone. I crossed and walked upstream. A narrow stream of water surfaced, but so shallow it had gone underground when it reached the fork. After about 10 or 15 minutes I arrived at the lower section of the waterfall. This is usually a broad wall of water, but there was only a narrow stream. I’m showing a photo from 2021 for comparison, but remember – I only cross when the river is quite shallow, so the photo on the right is when water levels are relatively low.

Lower section of the waterfall in 2025 on the left, and 2021 on the right.

I climbed upward over fallen logs and scrambled up a short, steep slope and around the bend. From here you can see the next section of the falls, before it curves away out of sight again. Here are the 2025 vs 2021 pictures, for the record.

Up and around the bend in 2025 on the left and the same spot in 2021 on the right.

Halloween and the Rains Begin

On Halloween the rains came at last – bad timing for trick-or-treaters but still very welcome. Amounts varied widely across short distances, but my rain gauge recorded 50 mm on October 31st and 15 mm on November 1st. A good soaking. And yet all that appeared in the pond was a shallow mud puddle, mere inches deep and about 5′ across. The water table was so low that 65 mm barely showed. (Note: I’m mixing units because I’m Canadian and that’s what we do.)

Before the rain on the left; after 65 mm of rain on the right – a mud puddle appears!

Then came another dousing of some 40 mm a few days later. More mud puddles appeared and they began to spread out and join up. But even with over 100 mm of rain, the pond was still a shallow pool with a wide rim of mud.That demonstrates how large a water deficit we incurred during this prolonged drought.

Left: Even after 105 mm of rain, there was still a wide rim of mud around the shallow pool.
Right: After a total of 138 mm the pond has reached the grassy verge, but is still very low.

After all that heat and sunshine, we seem now to be stuck in a cycle of rain, rain and more rain. It never rains but it pours? Yesterday, when I started writing this, another 33 mm poured down. So, after 138 mm in the course of a week, the pond has risen to the grassy verge. Much better but still very low – no kayaking through the forest this fall. But the forecast is for lots more rain (be careful what you wish for) so the pond will keep filling and rising. It’s been a long dry spell, but Hallelujah! The great drought is over. Now if only it would stop raining long enough for me to stack my wood, which was bone dry for weeks and is now sopping wet – doh!

Sue McKay Miller
November 7th, 2025

p.s. After I posted this blog we had 125 mm of rain over two days, for a total of 281 mm of rain in 12 days. The pond kept rising and rising until it overflowed and flooded into the woods. But with fresh snow on the mountains, I won’t be kayaking though the forest this year!

The pond on November 12th, 2025, after 281 mm of rain over 12 days.

Ups and Downs in the Holler

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So a funny thing happened. Three days after I posted my June blog on the impact of low water levels, it rained. And rained. And rained. The skies dumped 101 mm in 36 hours. Before this deluge the pond had largely drained into the permeable glacial till. The shallow waters that remained were covered with yellow lily pads and flowers.

On July 3rd L’il Pond had shrunk to a pair of shallow pools speckled with yellow lilies.
Yellow water lilies bloom on the pond while irises and other wild flowers bloom on the banks above.

When the rain began overnight on July 3rd I didn’t expect to see much change in the water level. This time of year, any rain is sucked up thirsty plants to nourish the rich foliage and transpired back into the air. I mentioned as much to a friend who had braved the torrential downpour for a visit.

So I was gobsmacked when we looked out at the pond after some food and chat. I’d just eaten lunch but now I had to eat my words. The lily pads and flowers had vanished. We watched as the rain poured down and the pond rose up, right before our eyes. The lakes on the highland plateau feed abundant brooks and freshets that follow gravity’s lure to the lowest ground, right here in the holler. This funneling effect leads to dramatic rises in water level that never cease to boggle my mind.

By July 5th the pond had risen about 3 metres and spread across the whole holler.

Later that day I took a gander down to the water’s edge. A few days earlier I’d photographed some blooming blue flag irises, high on the banks above the water. Now they were semi-submerged. The rising water had covered the field of marsh grass. And the dried-out pool I described in my June blog, with its sad remnants of desiccated tadpoles, was rapidly refilling with fresh, clean rainwater.

Even after the rain stopped the pond continued to rise as highland waters tumbled into the holler. The water inundated the irises and other flowers, eddied among shrubs and brambles, and reached up to wet the feet of maple and birch. That dried-out pool filled and filled until it spilled over the land bridge that had separated it from the main pond and doomed its tadpole denizens a week earlier. The pond was, once again, a single wee lake, just as it had been back in April.

Too late, alas, for many stranded tadpoles, although at least the bucketfuls I relocated now have plenty of water and time to transform. In Frogs, Globs, and Pollywogs I described my pollywog bucket brigade, saying: ‘I don’t think there’s an ecological issue with this – it’s all one body of water much of the year and is rejoined in summer if a post-tropical storm dumps torrential rains.‘ Well, true enough. But that bit I put in italics? It’s such a rare summer event that I didn’t actually expect it to happen. And I certainly didn’t expect it to happen just four days after I wrote those wistful, hopeful words.

A field of irises high and dry on July 3rd had vanished underwater by July 5th. The second photo is from a different angle because where I was standing two days earlier was underwater.

And what a transformation! Water is the giver of life. Every spring, as the snow melts and the freshets and brooks flow from the highlands to the holler, rushing water is the sound and scent and sight of renewal. So it was strange but exciting to feel that sense of rebirth in early summer. An unexpected gift. Even the local critters were rejuvenated (or maybe just confused?) by this spring-like transformation. The peepers, silent except for a few stragglers, revived their lively chorus. Bird song filled the evening air. It was as if the year had rewound back to early May.

Except … not. I felt a whiff of cognitive dissonance. The rushing waters, frog chorus and birdsong of spring were juxtaposed against the deep-green, chlorophyll-laden foliage of summer. The shoots and sprouts of Spring Ditty had exploded into a jungle of shrubs and wildflowers and brambles engulfing my home. The high water, while welcome, felt a bit weird.

L’il Pond always rises high in spring and autumn, but seldom in summer.
(You can can see the roof of the yurt peeking through the forest across the pond.)

And so this topsy-turvy year continues. It’s been a funny time to begin a blog. Before I started this project I jotted down topics that seemed suited to each season. But I’ve had to scratch some planned blogs (including the one for this month) and several of my posts been slightly out-of-sync with 2021’s slightly out-of-sync seasons. Unlike the deadly heat dome and ongoing drought out west, which has been positively attributed to climate change, it’s difficult to unravel how much of our funny weather is due to climate change and how much is down to the usual variation in weather.

Weather is a chaotic (that is, nonlinear) system and it’s particularly chaotic on this island, jutting out into the Atlantic and buffeted by systems from north, south and west; from land and sea. The deluge that filled the pond wasn’t even a named storm – neither Claudette nor Elsa – but just some random rain event. In Calgary I often heard the old saw ‘If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes’, but it’s even more apropos in my adopted home.

So pond goes up, pond goes down. I’ll have to wait until next year to see if there are noticeable impacts from this late inundation, but the species that survive and thrive here, from amphibians to alders, are adapted to rapidly changing water levels. Conversely, on a global scale, change is so rapid and extensive that many species don’t have time to evolve and adapt. Species have always gone extinct, but anthropogenic changes are sending the rate of extinction skyrocketing.

Yellow lily flowers basking in the sun were suddenly deep underwater, but are adapted to such changes.

When I worked as a geophysicist I would present my research at scientific conventions and meetings. Like most researchers, I always ended by presentations with words to the effect that ‘more research is needed’. It’s a cliche in science, but it’s also true. Scientific discoveries don’t lead to some totality of knowledge, but to ever more questions. No one today says, ‘Yep, we figured everything out. We’re all done here.’ (Many scientists did say that in the late 19th century, shortly before Einstein blew their minds with relativity theory and Bohr et al. dove down the bizarre rabbit hole of quantum mechanics.) Scientific research is a bit like tackling the mythic multi-headed Hydra: Chop off one head and two more grow back.

My learnings about this place are not remotely systematic or scientific. Rather they are the accumulation of casual observations, recorded in stacks of notebooks and journals over the past 17 years. But the principle still holds. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. And just when I think I’ve gained some understanding of the patterns, cycles, and seasons of this place, my assumptions are turned upside down and inside out, as if I’m in some Traveling Wilburys’ song.

So nature continues to surprise and humble me. In the never-say-never department: I wrote In my June blog about swimming in the pond, saying: ‘Not a hope of that this year’. Hah! Joke’s on me. I did indeed swim with frogs. I floated high above lily pads and flowers in that fresh, clean water. And as July passed, those drowned lilies grew up, up, up, drawn toward the light, and the water dropped down, down, down, lured by gravity. Now, at the end of July, those yellow lilies are, once again, breaching the surface to kiss the sun.

Sue McKay Miller
July 30, 2021