Dear Editor:
I have been overlooking the wastewater containment pond near Belsyde Avenue and St. David Street in Fergus. It is thickly populated with natural bulrushes, and has been a natural water source for breeding mallards, dragonflies, frogs, toads and red-wing blackbirds as well as a favourite drinking and bathing site for many species of local birds that nest in the surrounding trees.
This could be an idyllic natural place for many species to thrive were it not for adults who believe every child should have pet frogs, toads and tadpoles. Teachers bring whole classes armed with pails and nets; weekend visits from preteens raid the exposed water hoping to capture a specimen.
What about using teaching moments in nature to stress the interdependence of a chain of living things, from the microscopic life in a drop of water all the way up the food chain. Plundering large sections of the chain affects all other interdependent life.
The female mallard is forced to hide her family among the reeds, the great blue heron which visits in early mornings will soon find no frogs, the redwinged blackbirds will find it unsafe to raise their young in the reeds. Dragonfly nymphs will be doomed to die without tadpoles to feed upon. And on I could go.
Teach our kids about the interdependence that is the ecology we depend on for our own existence.
Arlene Callaghan,
Fergus