The Hydrologic Cycle

Dun Hagan is on the Florida Sand Ridge which is an ancient dune line dating from the Pleistocene era I believe. Many thousands of years ago the sea level was much higher than it is now so if I were living back then the homesite would probably have a wonderful ocean view.

Change is constant though and the centuries passed by as the frozen areas of the Earth gradually took up more and more water so that the levels of the worlds oceans fell and the coast line gradually wandered farther and farther away. Today it is about twenty five miles more or less as the crow flies to reach the Gulf.

But the dunes of that ancient shoreline still remain and have made for one of Florida's more unusual environments. There are no native rocks on the property. I'm sure there are some, but I'd probably have to dig thirty or forty feet to find them and likely would find heavy clay first. Above that it is sand and sandy loam all the way to the surface. As you might expect water drains away fast so that we never have a mud problem. This also means that surface water comes and goes according to the rainfall cycle of the time. If the area is low enough it may keep open water right on, but for the most part on the Sand Ridge you can't really count on having a pond from year to year.

Back in 2001 when I was doing the research prior to the purchase of Dun Hagan I availed myself of the new aerial and satellite photography web sites such as Terra Server that had recently come online to find as many photos of the place over the years as I could. Depending on the year the area behind the house just across the fence line was either dry prairie, a small to decent sized pond, or an arm of a much larger lake. A study in the drought cycle of North Florida.

But 2001 was several years into a drought cycle so when we closed on the place there was nothing out there but dry prairie with a couple of spots where the plant growth was more lush than the surrounding area, but certainly no open water. The maps, particularly the one hundred year flood plain maps we had to have as a part of the purchase, showed a pond, but there was nothing there. That's the way it stayed until the 2004 hurricane season rolled around and Florida found itself on a tropical weather roller coaster the likes of which we had never experienced before when for the first time since record keeping began we suffered the landfall of five named tropical cyclones. Bonnie gave us only a smattering of light rain as she was mostly a problem for the Panhandle. Charley had been predicted to hit us square on with 90mph winds, but he made his famous last minute jog to the east and did his best to blow away Punta Gorda and Arcadia. Missed us clean though without even a thunderstorm to show for it. Ivan gave us a bad time as we were in the cone for him for quite a while. Indeed the Friday before he made landfall he was projected to come ashore just twenty five miles away. But he too deviated from the script as hurricanes are often wont to do blowing northward to tear up the Panhandle again.

Frances and Jeanne though hit us square on. We were fortunate they came ashore first on the Atlantic side so that we only caught them after they'd been ashore for more than a hundred miles and the winds were much less. Jeanne still managed to blow the canopy of the big red oak on top of the house though which had me on the roof at the height of the storm with a chainsaw clearing it away and covering the damaged areas with a tarp.

It wasn't all bad news however because after Frances had passed we found ourselves with a pond where there had once only been dry prairie. Wasn't a lot of pond, but considering that we'd never seen water there before we were impressed. Then Jeanne came through and filled the pond still more so that we had a respectable body of water. We were very pleased to see it. Oh, for a few days we were fighting an onslaught of mosquitoes but about a week after they came the reproductive cycle of the local frog population caught up and we soon had literally tens of thousands of little green rain frogs everywhere. I've been in Florida all of my life and have never seen so many frogs in so small an area. The mosquito problem quickly disappeared. Gradually the predators that eat frogs caught up with the population boom and their numbers dwindled down to more normal levels.

The pond lasted for about two years. In the winter time I'd flush ducks off the water when I'd go outside at dawn to feed the chickens. We saw water birds of every species that calls North Florida home. I once saw a hawk take a coot right on the water. Had I not just happened to be looking in the right spot at the right instant I'd have missed the whole thing it happened so fast. The hawk hit the coot and flew off into a nearby oak tree to eat it. The coot never even flapped having been killed instantly.

But change is constant and 2006 proved to be a dry year as El Nino blew away our hurricane season and with it a good deal of our annual rainfall so the pond gradually dwindled until it finally disappeared altogether about six months ago or so. Back to dry prairie once more. At the end the wading birds cleaned up the trapped and dying amphibians that could not get away and the small population of minnows that had begun to flourish for a time.

Then came the February first winter storm rolling up out of the Gulf on its way to the northeast. We were fortunate that the big winds passed to the south of us. The folks in Lady Lake, Deland, and New Smyrna were not so that the last I heard the death toll was up to nineteen from the F3 (at present) tornado that went through Lady Lake and the other twisters that hit in other areas. What we did get out of it all was more than six inches of rain in one night. The next morning when I went out to feed the hens there was that shine on the ground across the fenceline that we'd come to miss. The pond was back!

It's not much of a pond, but I am impressed what one winter storm was able to do. The pond at present is about as full as it was when hurricane Frances first filled it back in 2004. We'll have to see what the 2007 rainfall cycle brings us to know whether it will once again disappear into the ground, remain the same, or even grow. 2006 was a dry year, I'm ready for a wetter one. How about you?

.....Alan.