A long time ago I made a little pond in our back yard. Ostensibly for the indoor fish (Koi, Comets) to spend Summer outside, but then the scope (and pond) got bigger. Waterfall, rocks for frogs to sunbathe, and deep sections so fish could survive Winter. May 19, 2004 I got the idea to add local fauna to the pond in the form of a couple scoops of plants and bugs from a nearby vernal pool (i.e. roadside ditch). Enjoying water bugs and tadpoles noodling around I spotted a small clump of sticks ... moving.
Posted about it on my blog and a reader ID’d it as a Caddisfly Larva.
Flash forward to yesterday, checking out the frogs in our messy little pond, when a bundle of sticks walked by underwater.
Here's a photo of the caddisfly larva from 2004. Also some photos of the pond from its initial expansion to when the plants really started taking off. Years later the liner got a slow leak. It's one of those things where I don't want to dismantle the whole thing to fix it when it's full of tadpoles, but at the end of the season it's too cold.