Pond Silted In or Holding Less Water in Kountze, TX

A pond on a Kountze tract is worth most as a water source in the dry weeks of late summer and early fall, when the sloughs have gone dry and game has to move to find water. That is precisely when a shallow pond has heated through, gone green and pulled back to a ring of mud. Deer stop coming to it, the trail cameras on it go quiet, and the owner starts thinking the tract has lost its game when what it has lost is its water. Depth is the whole answer. A pond that carries real depth of cool water under the summer waterline stays a water source through September. A pond that has silted to a shallow dish does not. When we clean one out here we are buying that depth back, and where the clay profile allows it we go past the original floor so the pond does not need this again for a long time.

Most tracts around Kountze have a road running back to the camp or the stands, and most of those roads have a section that goes soft every wet season and gets rutted deeper each year. On sandy, sloped ground that section is a channel, and every rain moves sand down it toward the low point of the tract, which is the pond. Old skid trails from the last timber harvest do the same thing under the regrowth. The fix pays twice. The sand that comes out of the pond is exactly the material the soft road section needs, so the cleanout spoil goes into the road, the road stops rutting, and the pond stops taking sand from it. We turn out the trails that still run and put a shallow settling basin on the main inflow so what still moves is caught where a small machine can scrape it every few years.

On the Gulf Coast clay south of us a pond holds on its own and can be deepened without much thought. Up here some sites hold clay at depth and others carry sand or a sand lens a foot or two under the pond floor, and a pond deepened into that fills in a wet spell and drains between rains. Kountze soils are acidic and sandy on the uplands and the profile changes quickly, so we dig test holes in the exposed bottom before setting a new depth. If the clay continues, we take the floor down. If it does not, we stop at the clay and gain volume by widening. There is one more thing to establish on this ground. Big Thicket National Preserve is a set of units and corridors scattered through this country rather than a single block, and a pond near a preserve boundary or in the wet ground beside one may not be a plain excavation. Village Creek and its tributaries drain the area, and a pond built by damming a drainage toward the creek can carry Section 404 jurisdiction. We look at where the pond sits at the walk and say plainly which kind it is.

A dam on a Kountze slope holds real head, and a levee that is passing water fails with somewhere for the water to go. A wet toe on a dry day, a slump in the downstream face or a tree rooted through the dam is the reading to rule out before the silt is probed, and a dam that shows any of it stays free of trucks until it has been looked at. Harvey and Imelda both put Village Creek well out of its banks and sent more water down these slopes than most older ponds were built to pass, so the emergency spillway gets checked and sized on every cleanout. The banks of a silted hunting pond have usually grown up in yaupon and young hardwood, and on recreational ground we generally mulch that rather than pile it. It leaves a mat that holds the slope, it opens a shooting lane to the water if the owner wants one, and it avoids a burn pile in a county where the burn ban position changes through the year.