Our pool was full of gunk this spring above the winter cover. You name it, we had it floating in the rain and snow melt that accumulated on top the cover: bugs, hydrangea flower heads, leaves, pieces of plastic from the roof repair, assorted garbage blown by the wind.
It doesn’t look too bad in this photo except for the piece of plastic floating around.
Pool Before Cleaning Up
We also had pollywogs, also known as tadpoles. Baby frogs and toads. Legless, not able to survive out out of the water, gills, not amphibian yet, little critters. Thousands of pollywogs. Our backyard is home to dozens of amorous frogs (all of whom like to sing at night) and those frogs apparently found true love in our swimming pool.
When Dave cleaned the pool for summer the first step was to pump off the couple feet of water that accumulated above the winter cover. As the water level went down we could see polywogs and more polywogs. Neither of us wanted to pump the water dry and let the little critters die, but what to do?
First he got as many as he could with a net when the water was down to a few inches. He set up a big garbage can and pumped some of the pool water in there, then got lots and lots of tadpoles with a net.
Lots of Tadpoles!
As we got down to the end we hoisted the cover – still darn heavy with several gallons of water – onto the deck and tried to get the rest to flow into the net. I think we got most but surely some “escaped”, which is a death sentence to little water creatures.
We had plenty of gunky stuff in the garbage can, lots of rotting vegetation. We worried that the rotting vegetation plus the limited surface area meant the tadpoles would suffocate from lack of oxygen. Dave went out and got a kid’s wading pool, about 6 feet across, and transferred the tadpoles and a lot of water into it.
Swimming through Gunky Water
We have a small solar fountain so I added that too. Of course it got fouled within the hour but it still spurts little jets of water every now and then. It is the floating black circle in this picture and you can see the small jet of water.
Tadpoles and Solar Fountain
Dave boiled lettuce and fed them. Here we have it, Tadpole Haven!
Tadpole Haven
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