Tips and Tricks for Building a Mini Wildlife Pond?

Nature Talk
41

Pumps are completely unnecessary and harmful for wildlife ponds, they’re only useful for fish and duck ponds.
Wildlife ponds require nothing but hydrophytes to be clear and lively. Aim for a complete plant cover, using both fully submerged species and emergent ones.

I obviously want the water to stay in the pond, but am against the ugly black plastic or any sort of metal container or whatever. Can I use clay as a liner?

It will be extremely difficult and dependant on the type of soil you have.
If your garden soil is already extremely clay-rich it would be worth it to try to dig a small hole, press it and see if it retains water, if not I would give up on the idea.
Remember that plastic liner isn’t necessarily unsightly, the plastic borders can and should be buried and rendered invisible, whereas the bottom of the pond will naturally fill with sludge over time.

How much of a problem are mosquitoes?

Mosquitoes are pioneer animals, they only thrive in bodies of water with a young and unstable ecosystem.
When I built my first pond five years ago (I built three so far) the surface was absolutely teeming with mosquito larvae, but after the first year they were all gone. Once the pond becomes stable and predators move in the environment will become completely unsuitable for mosquito larvae.

Will marsh marigold survive in a somewhat sunny and small location?

Absolutely. If anything you’ll have to keep an eye on it to control its expansion.
Almost all aquatic plants are extremely aggressive growers that will occupy any space they can.

Will waterlilies take over?

Yes and they can completely cover the pond if you’re not careful. I would recommend planting them in a container without holes.

How easily are diving beetles and pond snails attracted?

Diving beetles are some of the first animals who will colonize the pond, I have many myself.
Pond snails won’t come on their own, but if you transport plant material from a nursery or natural body of water it’s inevitable that you will have snails.

Only native plants are allowed

100%.

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42

Marsh marigold loves seepy wetlands with saturated soil, but i’ve never seen it in an open water pond that keeps water throghout the year. So it would probably like the edges, but won’t grow in a pond like a water lily or bulrushes.

I’d recommend you put some dead logs on the edge or even sticking into the water, if you can get them. It really adds to the biodiversity, even if it’s just a small limb if the pond is tiny.

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43

I’ll try that, good idea! I’ve heard dragonflies love to perch on these types of things.

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44

So true.

  1. A dragonfly laid her eggs into the fishtank that had been left outside before we could get around to taking it inside (it’s a huge, heavy beast, holds >550 litres). Some rainwater had collected in it. Since a bunch of larvae was already living in the dirt at the bottom, we decided the fishtank would remain outside until they emerged. We stuck some dead appletree branches in there so they would have something to climb up on when their time came. This was our first encounter with dragonfly larvae and we had no idea what species it was and how long they would remain at the larval stage. The fishtank had no filter, cover or other luxury – it was just a container that eventually filled with rainwater in the fall, and during a cold spell in the winter it even froze with layer of ice 10 cm thick at the top. Yet the larvae survived and emerged in the following spring.
  2. A tub (80 cm diameter, 30 cm high) had collected rainwater during the winter. When I meant to empty it, I found a cluster of frog eggs attached to a branch that had fallen in. Thanks to the help of the people here in the forum, ‘my’ kids made it to adulthood.
  3. My concerns about all this stagnant water providing a breeding ground for mosquitoes proved unjustified. Backswimmers are very quick in populating water that attracts mosquitoes.
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45

Keep in mind in some places, like here in Wisconsin, mosquitofish are considered an invasive species.

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46

If I were to have a pond again (oh my aching back!), I would likely go with whatever the county or local water resource authorities recommended for mosquito abatement. Here, as mentioned, it’s a type of mosquito fish.

Also, my pond did not have an outlet of any kind to any waterway. I had to top it off with water frequently and I did partial water changes whenever I cleaned the biological filter every few months.

I considered the “waste water” I removed in cleaning the filter to be liquid gold and threw it over the patio shrubs. Best garden fertilizer ever! In fact it was the only fertilizer I ever used while I had a pond and my plantings ~never~ looked better. I really miss having a pond.

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47

Gambusia is the antithesis of any form of wildlife that could colonize a pond, both within and outside of their native range; they voraciously consume any type of aquatic insect and amphibian larva until they’re the only thing left.
The mosquito control of a wildlife pond should be provided by dragonfly nymphs, aquatic beetles and nepomorphs.

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48

Our first pond had goldfish.

Then I learnt to prefer to make habitat for locally indigenous dragonflies and water bugs of all sorts. And I want to hear our frogs sing - I do!

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49

Keeping the thread alive.

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50

I am all in favor of biodiversity, obviously, but …

I have a tiny pool I put in my backyard, with a hard plastic liner. In the fall, I try to remove leaves that have blown in and I cut down the dying leaves of the blue flag iris in pots. Well, I can’t reach the middle of the pool from the edge and it’s been unnaturally warm recently, so I put on watershoes and shorts and stepped into the pool with one leg for 5 minutes to cut down part of the iris clumps.

LEECHES. Tiny ones, but LEECHES. Hungry ones. There must have been 20 attached to my right leg. Did I run for my camera to take an iNat photo? No, I flicked them all off IMMEDIATELY.

I need to do a little research to find out how leeches get moved from one pond to another. And maybe buy some cheap hip waders for next year’s clean-up.

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51

well, leaves are supposed to fall in ponds. They are the base of the food web for a lot of organisms. I know with a small pond and a large tree you will probably soon have a wetland instead of a lake. Which is better ecologically, but not what most people want, and it’s true a tiny mucky wetland won’t have the same animals. Leeches are as far as i know all native species so if you aren’t using it as a swimming pond (which isn’t ever gonna go well unless it’s got lots of water flow through) they aren’t harmful. Things eat leaches too, like wading birds, waterfowl, and fish.

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52

But I like leeches! They’re cute.

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53

Exactly! I am trying to maintain it as a pond, not a wetland, although the Bogbean seems to be trying to colonize every pot and turn it into a wetland. And I never do get every stray leaf out; usually it’s too cold and rainy at this time of year to fish out every leaf. So there’s quite a layer of muck at the bottom.

As for the leeches, I’m happy they are there and maybe next year they’ll be big enough to photograph. I just don’t want them on me. It’s like the deer mice - they are welcome to live in my shed, but I don’t want them in my kitchen. And maybe the dragonfly larvae and other predaceous inverts will eat the leeches.

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54

Leeches are fascinating! Just not attached to me!

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55

Well maybe if you didn’t spend so much time IDing you’d have time for that!
Just kidding … We appreciate all your IDing!

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56

We had leeches in our Porterville pond - and I wondered if they came with the frogs somehow? Haven’t waded into this pond, so who knows - shall hope the dragonflies are keeping up.

57

My pond was colonized by leeches and aquatic snails when I introduced plants from water nurseries and rocks from the local stream in the water. I think the only way these animals can colonize an isolated pond is with human help, although there are probably cases where they’ve been transported by other animals too.

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58

Interesting that your bog bean is so aggressive. I have one in one of my bog bins and it’s barely doing anything. It’s in there with Carex lasiocarpa which likes similar habitats, the Carex is happy and it is not. Maybe next year it’ll finally get going.

59

All this talk of leeches calls to mind a scene in the classic Humphrey Bogart/Katherine Hepburn movie The African Queen, in which they have to get out of the boat to tow it through the reeds and then, well, you can guess…

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It took it two or three years to get going.