MY NAME IS GERARD VISSER and I made this site. I wrote on the reason why on other pages. It was and is time consuming monk's work. So it is inconvenient that I do have a LOT of hobbies , so many, you don't wanna know! Furthermore I spend time on my partner, family and friends, and sporting... so how to find some time?
Fortunately some hobby’s can be combined and my friend shares a few, so there's some time gain. Together with her I had many a beautiful day in the nature.
As a child I already was fascinated by animals from the ditch, stimulated by older friends who gave me pictures and jars with tadpoles. I had sticklebacks in a little jar who ate each other because I didn't know fish need their meals too... Later I borrowed books on the subject from the youth-library and made ditchwater aquariums with the boy next door. Years later I picked up the net again and started making my first macro photo's. The picture of the silver beetle is from that time. In those years the reprints of the magnificent „Verkade-albums”came out and in honour of these great works I gave my website a style which is a bit like the pages of these albums. The background of the site is a picture of the paper structure of a page and border of one of the original albums.
In further years I always tried to have at least a small ditchwater aquarium each spring, to raise tadpoles. End 1988 I came to live in Almelo, unfortunately not a good place for the „ditch hobby” - it's simply to dry out here! However there are some clean streams and recreational waters, where there is life. There are also nature reservations with wet mores, where you can see many dragonflies (and bloodsucking flies, alas…). But most of all our own little pond, where newts return every year, was a treasure-chest of observations and it was very good to sit there on a beautiful spring day. In the year 2021 we moved to Aadorp (near Almelo) and now we have one large pond, also visited by newts and other animals. There's also a stream next to our garden.
This site is a product of several hobbies. I hope you will take pleasure from the things you find here and that people who knew few or nothing of the life in pond and stream, learned something here.If you want to ask something, want to tell me something which has to do something with this site or want to point me out a mistake or misspell - please do so and send an e-mail by filling in the e-mail form on the COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS PAGE.
On the revision history page you can see how this site is growing with large gaps.