The Big Pond Dip

The Big Pond Dip starts today 26th May 2009.

Do the Big Pond Dip to find out what state your pond is in and at the same time help Pond Conservation learn more about what’s actually living in garden ponds.

Amazingly we know almost nothing at all about the real variety of wildlife thats found in our garden ponds, or how best to design our ponds for wildlife.

With the Big Pond Dip we’re starting the process of finding out. 

You can get the survey form here, and post your results online here.

I’ll try to post the results from my garden tomorrow.

It’s a great half term activity too.

Why I like bulrush

Here’s another reason I like my bulrushes: they’re an egg laying site for the damselflies. These are Large Reds this afternoon (26 May).

9.30 today: snapping frog

Cute little things frogs, aren’t they?

But not if you’re this emerging Broad-bodied chaser dragonfly.

This one had a narrow escape – as it was climbing up the grass at the edge of the pond to find a place to begin shedding its skin, our little froggy friend above took a big snap.

Luckily for dragonfly, but not for froggy, the dragonfly was too big to fit the frog’s mouth.

And in this little drama we saw something that’s probably common, which usually goes un-remarked.

My standard guide to amphibians, the latest Collins New Naturalist on amphibians says:

‘Feeding [by frogs] occurs exclusively on land, with frogs emerging on mild damp nights in the spring and autumn in search of food’.

The earlier New Naturalist says:

‘During the breeding season the frogs do not eat at all, and after this those frogs which remain in the water for some weeks invariably leave it to feed’.

Well, obviously not. But it makes sense. For a frog, if there’s a big tasty snack emerging right in front of your nose, go for it!

And its not the first time I’ve seen this: last year I saw a frog snapping up (it didn’t miss) the unfortunate male of a pair of egg-laying Large Red Damselflies.

Given what a tiny amount of time I actually spend looking at the pond, this suggests that frogs snapping up dragonflies and damselflies might be more common than meets the eye.

Now we are three (bulrushes)

My bulrush, today

Last year I was terribly exited as my pond was colonised by wild self-seeded bulrush.

Most wildlife specialists would find this event quite uninspiring: after all, bulrushes are very common, they do colonise new ponds in the countryside very easily, they haven’t got pretty flowers and they often grow in rather nasty polluted places.

On top of this most people are taught that bulrushes are highly invasive: indeed I was passed a new garden pond leaflet the other day which listed them as unsuitable for small ponds.

To me though the arrival of the bulrush was proof my garden pond could work just like a ‘real’ pond. Swapping animals and plants with other freshwater habitats.

So the continued happy progress of my plants is interesting.

From the one plant last year there are now three – not very tall – plants.

They have been used as an egg-laying site (more later on this) and my Large Red Damselflies have used them to emerge on.

I’m not worried they’ll get out of hand – if they do I will – wait for it – pull some out, which of course I can easily do.

But I think they’re not growing very fast because in a low nutrient, clean water pond, they will have to compete for food with the other plants animals in the pond.

Ducks: arch enemies of pondlife!

Ducks are going big as the web scours the English language for waterfowl  puns.

See Steve Bell in the Guardian as a good starting point.

The infamous Guido Fawkes was quickest off the mark yesterday with ‘Out for a duck’. 

But remember:

If you want to make a really good wildlife pond, ducks are the arch enemies of pondlife.

Sir Peter Vigger’s duck pond

Personally I would never add a duck house to a pond because it simply encourages unnaturally large numbers of ducks to use your pond, which is a sure fire way of ruining the pond as a wildlife habitat.

Now I’ve nothing against ducks, and a special pond in the park for feeding the ducks is fun and a great British tradition – but in the garden? They really are just too destructive to be a sensible proposition.

If only Sir Peter had known this…..who knows, just maybe…..

That’s a bit more like it

Amongst the absurdly pretentious at Chelsea was this.

I like this a lot – really stylish (except for the boat, which completely ruins it: just pretend that’s not there), and with that beautiful clear water and just a touch of water plants – you could see this turning into a really nice pond in no time at all!

How cool would it be to have to walk through a clean water pond to get to your front door? I especially love the steps just under the water.

Chelsea

Today had quick look around at Chelsea.

Inevitably I spend most of the time looking for a garden with a decent pond.

Here I am looking slightly morose when confronted by the standard turbid water/frogbit/lilies cliché.

Still, the Blue Peter pond is looking much more like the real McCoy now.

More soon.

AAAAhhhhhhhhhhhh……………..

Taking a quick look at a pond in a demonstration wildlife garden in a prominent London location backed by information from a major conservation organisation.

So what do we have……..

It’s my day for getting depressed about what people are shown as representative of ‘ponds’.

A steep-side, over deep, hole filled with the standard lilies, iris and polluted water.

I blame the advice leaflet that says:

‘Place a layer of soil over the bottom of the pond to allow plants to grow and cover the edge with soil and turf’.

The sad thing is that I expect a lot of effort and goodwill has gone into this and its a shame that things couldn’t turn out better.

Looking again, the photograph is flattering – you can’t see how scummy it is (still, at least there were some taddies).

The Makeover: adding the water

We needed 1200 litres of rainwater to fill the pond. This is 120 of the buckets in the picture or roughly 6 standard 200 litre water butts.

Here’s Andy and Chris putting in the first few buckets.

For this special demonstration we collected all this water and added it at once.

In practice there’s no need to fill a pond all in one go – so you don’t need to have six water butts available.

One thing to say about the rectangular Blue Peter pond, all of the same depth, is that it does take quite a lot of water to fill.

My garden pond, which is about the same surface area, needed less than half this amount of water.