This week on the channel +716K views this week

Leafy Street's backyard pond makes room for a whole food web

Alex's frog refuge brings salamanders, trail-camera visitors and a hunting hawk into a two-year ecosystem story.

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Leafy Street Story of November 1, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.

I Let a Pond Evolve for 2 years

Video summary

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0:32Alex and his dad install a used pond shell near the woods, adding rocks, logs and swamp water.
4:02Salamander larvae appear in the pond, prompting Alex to investigate which species they might be.
9:23Autumn and winter bring departing larvae, animal tracks in snow and a frozen pond.
10:45Burrows and flattened brush prompt a trail-camera investigation into the pond's visitors.
14:24An adult yellow-spotted salamander appears, followed by a growing frog population.
15:34A hunting hawk shows how the pond has become part of the surrounding food web.

A used pond shell, a hole dug with his dad and some swamp water: Alex's backyard wildlife refuge starts modestly. The waiting is the point. Salamander larvae appear before the hoped-for crowd of frogs, and eventually even a hawk finds something worth visiting.

Leafy Street posted nothing new this week, but "I Let a Pond Evolve for 2 years" is drawing the most daily views among its moving older uploads. It has reached roughly 8.6 million views. The sponsored video follows Alex's attempt to give local amphibians an alternative to hazardous backyard swimming pools, with trail cameras revealing mice, opossums and raccoons along the way.

The hawk's arrival gives the project a less cuddly kind of success: a refuge for frogs has also become a feeding place for a predator. Alex accepts that as part of the ecosystem he wanted to build, rather than treating the pond as an enclosure sealed off from everything around it.

Across the channel, daily viewing is running at less than half its usual pace, while subscribers were unchanged over the week. Nearby animal channels had quite different weeks: Sierra Rose added subscribers, while Dexter's World and Miller Wilson also held steady.

The pond isn't the only long experiment finding viewers. "Expanding My Tiny Beach Ecosystem (I regret it)" follows a miniature habitat after its collapse, while "I Bought Seahorses so you don't have to (seriously don't)" documents the difficulties of keeping and breeding dwarf seahorses. On Leafy Street, building the habitat is only the beginning of the story.

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