Gribbit!
Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved animals. It didn't matter what sort of animal it was: if it moved she wanted one as a pet. How about a caterpillar, slowly munching its way through leaves? She would collect caterpillars and plenty of food plants and leaves for them and they would munch their way through all that in her bedroom up to the time they formed into a chrysalis. Then she'd wait patiently until they hatched into a butterfly or moth, at which point she would sadly let her pet fly away. Or perhaps a cute furry animal like a guinea pig? She had lots of them: so many they needed their own garden shed.
One day she was cycling along the track past GZ with her mother and father and older brother. This was a long time ago (nearly 25 years), well before the current track layout was formed, which was altered so that all the big pine trees could be logged, and the main track followed the original railway formation back then. However, there was a turn off to the right (coming from Kaitoke) that went up a steeper slope, round a loop and then back down to the main track. The family decided to take this detour one day to see where it led. It led straight past a large artificial pond that had been built up the bank. A big hole had been dug out and lined with a rubber liner. Over the years the liner had become torn in places and the pond was only half full of water. And in that water there were thousands and thousands of tadpoles swimming about! Of course the little girl just HAD to have some tadpoles for her pet collection. So not long after that the family returned on another outing, armed with nets and jars, to catch some tadpoles that they could carry home.
She kept the tadpoles in a fish tank in her bedroom and watched as they first grew some back legs, then some front legs and finally started to become distinctly frog-shaped as their tadpole tails grew shorter and shorter. Finally they were tadpoles no longer, but instead had turned into little Southern Bell frogs. At that time the garden had a newly dug pond, so she decided to release her pet frogs into the new pond. And ever since that day the garden has been the home for an ever-expanding collection of Southern Bell frogs, generations of them descended from the tadpoles in the original rubber-lined pond. Every late spring and early summer, during warm weather, you can hear all the male frogs competing loudly with each other for mates. Gribbit! Gribbit!
A descendant of one of the original tadpoles the little girl collected
This cache is situated right next to that original pond alongside the old railway line, which we always referred to as 'The Frog Pond'. As a family we would visit it often. The pond water level was even lower with a lot more debris in the pond and a lot of algae on its surface when the cache was placed. The original railway formation in this area has also become totally overgrown from disuse: the new logging road followed the detour past the pond, not the original track, for some reason. You can still make out where the old railway track went, though, if you look carefully: there is a wide gap between the pine trees below the pond around a big curve. These are the pines that were replanted after the original logging operation and, of course, nobody planted the new pines in the middle of the track. But when the logging trucks stopped using the track the native plants were able to slowly take over, so 20 years later you are hard pressed to see that there was ever a track there.
And why was an artificial pond ever placed here? We don't know, but guess it was to provide water in case of fire when the forest was first planted. Perhaps a helicopter could have filled a monsoon bucket from the pond when it was full?
Sadly the last time I went past to check the cache there was no water in the pond at all, even though it was winter: the original liner obviously no longer holds water, so no more pond and no more frogs. So if you visit this cache in the warm spring and summer weather you are now unlikely to hear them here like we used to, going 'Gribbit'!