R. K. Cook's video: The Death of a Georgia Pond

HANK WILDING'S JOURNAL: Georgia summers are every bit as miserable as you've always heard. Hot and humid as hell. Stepping outside feels like getting slapped in the face with a wet washrag. Georgia summers take their toll on animals and their habitat. Case in point, my little rain-fed frog pond, which went from an oasis to a desert in a matter of weeks in the summer of 2015. Home to a dizzying variety of critters both in and around it, the pond was no match for the sweltering heat and rare-as-hen's-teeth rainfall. The critters who could crawl or slither out did so. The tadpoles weren't so fortunate. I "rescued" as many as I could, toting bucketful after bucketful to nearby Little Cotton Indian Creek and dumping them, whereupon most promptly got eaten up by fish. Thousands more perished in the incredible shrinking pond. The stench was ungodly. With ample rain, the pond swells to roughly the size of a football field. By July, with temps in the 90s most days, it had shrunk to a Buick-sized puddle. Realizing the death of the pond was inevitable, I decided to set up my Moultrie A-5 Digital Game Camera and record the final death throes. It took less than three days for the puddle to become a bog. As the weeks went by and no rain came and temperatures soared, the pond turned into a bleached-out mosaic of pottery shards. Several critters — a red-tailed hawk, American crows and an opossum — checked out the smorgasbord of dead and dying polliwogs. What appears to be a Northern water snake slithers across the parched pond bed, getting the hell out of Dodge. Lastly, a male Northern cardinal seems bewildered about what's become of his birdbath. Too sad for words. And it's happening again this year. If you want to see the amazing variety of wildlife the pond supports at peak pool, check out "Georgia Pond Is Wildlife Wonderland" on this channel.