Friday, April 27, 2012

Where Have Fort Worth's Fosdic Ducks & Turtles Gone?

Fosdic Mama Duck & Babies
It has been a few days since I've walked around Fosdic Lake in Oakland Lake Park in East Fort Worth.

Something appears to have gone dire wrong since the last time I had a close up look at Fosdic Lake.

Every year, during the HOT heat of summer, when the temperature goes over 100 day after day, Fosdic Lake can take on a greenish hue, due to algae flourishing in the warm water.

It is currently a bit less than 2 months until summer. The temperature has gotten into the high 80s and low 90s a couple times this year. Currently it is 89.

Yet, for some reason Fosdic Lake has a huge mass of green vegetative matter floating over much of the lake.

I only saw about 10 ducks today and five of them were the babies you see in the picture.

Where have all the Fosdic ducks gone? And the other Fosdic birds? Are the Fosdic birds being like a parakeet in a mine? Do they know that Fosdic Lake has turned foul and have escaped to cleaner waters?

None of the Fosdic ducks I saw today were in the water. Maybe they do not like floating in a high wind. As it was being very windy today in the noon time frame. Or maybe ducks don't like floating with little islands of algae.

Green Algae Vegetation Blown Up Against Fosdic Dam
Usually the Fosdic ducks are very skittish. Usually when the ducks are land bound they quickly get lake bound when I get close to them. Today none of the ducks seemed to care that I was close to them. It was like I was the least of their worries, with a new worry taking top precedence, that being their home that was growing green.

And where were the Fosdic turtles? The turtles love it when the temperature is as hot as it is today. Usually I'd see dozens of Fosdic turtles, swimming in the water, sunning on logs. Today no turtles.

What is Fosdic Lake going to be like when the heat of summer arrives? Will it become totally choked with algae?

This is all very disturbing.

3 comments:

CatsPaw said...

If we'd had a harder winter, that stuff probably wouldn't be blooming that much yet. Warm temperatures and run off from recent rains is probably feeding that filamentous algae. Your ducks and turtles will eat some of it. Only if there is a lot more of it and a massive die-off (which will reduce oxygen levels) should it cause too much of a problem to Fosdic Lake. If you start to see a lot of dead fish, I'd get concerned. Perhaps the other ducks and turtles just found something else to do today. I hope so.

You missed a great opportunity by >justthismuch< to turn a great phrase:

Do they [these fowl] know that Fosdic Lake has turned foul and have escaped to cleaner waters?

You could help Fosdic Lake by taking your daily swim and thrashing about to stir things up.

P.S. Did you receive any photos from me yesterday?

Durango said...

CatsPaw, I did not receive any photos from you yesterday. Damn unreliable Internet.

I purposefully used the 'foul' word, thinking of 'fowl', but I ain't as clever as you to think to turn the phrase to your level of clever. Methinks I should run my verbiage by you before hitting the publish button and thus amp up the cleverness level.

I shall consider your proposal that I do my swimming in Fosdic Lake to help with the oxygenating.

CatsPaw said...

We can't blame the Internet for it this time. I have a new kinda-smart phone and evidently I am not even minimally-smart enough to manage to correctly send pictures from it. I didn't delete all of them so I'll give it another shot tomorrow.