I built a wildlife pond [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LvaX748pVI

by politelemon • 4 years ago

250 90 4 years ago

carapace• 4 years ago

See also this thread on Permies.com forums: "My Progress Gleying a Pond With Pigs" https://permies.com/t/38201/Progress-Gleying-Pond-Pigs Long story short: pigs make ponds. You gotta see it to believe it.

culi2• 4 years ago

It's a technique that goes back to Russian peasantry (and likely before that). But it's also possible with ducks as Geoff Lawton has shown in another video. If you don't have the patience to let a bunch of ducks breed but you still want to build a pond without plastic liner you can also look into buying bentonite clay (or you may already have some clay underneath already. Just dig and find out! Just make sure to preserve the topsoil so you can replace it)

musicale• 4 years ago

Slightly OT, but is youtube even usable without an ad blocker?

Occasionally I make the mistake of going to it in a browser without aggressive ad blocking and it's miserable.

paulcole4• 4 years ago

For me it is! In exchange for $12 or so a month, I never see any ads.

blamazon3• 4 years ago

Can someone explain to me why this sentiment is often downvoted on HN? Why is YouTube seemingly the only software platform that people chafe at having an ad-free tier and seemingly believe should be completely free to all with no ads?

It seems absolutely intuitive to me that if you don't want to see ads on a content enterprise, which are monetizing that content enterprise, you should generally be prepared to pay. Why is that deemed so outrageous with regards to YouTube?

_hcuq• 4 years ago

My problem is that I hate the suggestion algorithm. Does paying get rid of that?

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

ublock wasn't enough ? i never felt the need to pay with it

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I get enough out of YouTube that I’m willing to pay that. Apparently a premium view pays out more to creators than hundreds of regular views, so that feels good too. But I can’t believe so many normal people (who don’t know about adblockers or watch in the app) are able to stand non-premium YouTube, honestly.

Geee• 4 years ago

It is usable but incredibly frustrating. It seems that Youtube's strategy is to annoy users with ads as much as possible to get them to upgrade to the paid plan.

dylan604• 4 years ago

Is that really the strategy, or is it to sell as many ads as possible?

cryptonector• 4 years ago

javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 10)

readthenotes12• 4 years ago

Can we get {video} tags added to the title? Every time one of these links opens directly to a video I feel like I've been Rick rolled

sbierwagen• 4 years ago

It shows what domain the link goes to. Did you expect a text post at youtube.com?

readthenotes12• 4 years ago

It doesn't for me in my rss reader :(

ilamont6• 4 years ago

If you build a pond, wildlife will come.

I've done two small fish ponds using heavy duty rigid plastic liners expecting only the fish (koi and shubunkin) would enjoy it. We live less than ~10 miles/~15 km from downtown Boston.

We were surprised to see the second pond, which is next to the north side of our basement and on a small hill, gets all kinds of animals and birds coming to drink. Racoons, possum, fox, squirrels, and many types of small birds. Without fail, one or two tree frogs find it every summer and settle in on the water plant we put out there (taro) in a semi-submerged pot.

The frogs disappear in the early autumn. Before the first hard frost, we bring the taro plant inside in a bucket, and place it next to a sunny window for the next 5 or 6 months. By mid-December the pond freezes over except where we have a small pump running. The fish go dormant at the bottom, under the ice.

Then in spring it starts back up again. The ice melts, the fish come back to life, and the animals return to drink. We put the taro plant back out, and once again the pond is the center of life in our side yard.

Images:

https://www.instagram.com/p/4O0ZZGJJvH/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CiwTVBLOuUG/

ilamont6• 4 years ago

Just remembered, I did a video about making the pond. Includes clips of the fish under the ice.

https://youtu.be/8ExfrhjpMp4

rexreed• 4 years ago

Do you find any wild animals (raccoons) eat the fish? Also any opinions on floating plants (water hyacinth, water lettuce, frogbit) instead of Taro? I built a pond and put in a soft PVC liner instead of one of those preformed ones. I had it out for a summer expecting frogs but they didn't show. Mosquitos did tho.

zeropoint46• 4 years ago

I'm a novice when it comes to this, so apologies for the dumb question. Can you explain how you manage the taro plant? Like how can it grow in a pot completely submerged then be brought inside? Can taro be both grown partially submerged and out of water? Thanks for the info.

lostlogin• 4 years ago

I’m not sure if it’s the same taro, but people grow it in the ground here in New Zealand.

ilamont6• 4 years ago

Google taro water garden, and you will see many results, including instructional videos for this plant. We purchased the taro plant from a garden supply store that sold us the plastic liner. This was more than 10 years ago. This species of taro can live in partially submerged pots, and we still have it planted in the original pot. The plant tries to self propagate in the late summer sending out little runners with leaves attached but it can’t root anywhere because there is no shallow muddy spots by our pond. It’s just the plastic liner which drops off to about 2 feet at the edge of the plastic. On the other side of the hard plastic liner is ordinary soil, which is not wet enough for the taro, but other plants, including ferns and ground cover take root there and grow over the edge of the plastic liner as shown in the video below.

https://youtu.be/8ExfrhjpMp4

elihu6• 4 years ago

I have a taro plant that I bring inside in the winter. Basically, I just transfer the pot to a large tub of water, where it can be mostly submerged.

I let the water level get pretty low last winter so only the bottom few inches of the pot were in water. It didn't do well and almost died, but over the summer in the pond it multiplied quite a bit and we could have had half a dozen taro plants if I wanted to plant all the runners.

pvaldes7• 4 years ago

Many robust aquatic plants are aquatic only for a while. They evolved to respond to flooding and to stand dry spells. You can just put the pot inside and treat it as any other indoor plant. You could probably just let it dry in winter. Colocasia can be cultured in water and also out of the water.

technological• 4 years ago

None of these animals which come to drink water do not try to eat fish ?

ilamont6• 4 years ago

Raccoons do, by scooping (they do not like to stand in the water or swim). The pond has deep areas and we put broken pots and cinder blocks so fish can hide. We also get darker fish which are harder for predators to see. Certain local bird species such as herons do too, but they won’t come under low tree canopy or near the house.

elihu6• 4 years ago

I haven't had a problem with it yet, but that's not to say I won't.

One suggestion (which I didn't follow) is to make sure the whole pond is at least a couple feet deep everywhere. Having shallow ledges just gives herons a convenient place to stand while they depopulate the pond of aquatic animals.

I wanted a place to set potted water plants though.

We did have an incident with a red-tail hawk. I was out chatting with one of the roommates by the pond when it lands nearby, and promptly catches and eats a snake.

The hawk was acting weird and not flying away, so we called up the Audubon society. They said if it looked injured we could try to catch it and bring it in to their office, so we donned welding gloves and every other available kind of PPE and chased it through the bushes and blackberry thickets of three properties before we finally caught it.

Fun fact: hawks are pretty docile when you cover their heads. We expected a fight and try to bite our fingers off but when we got a towel over it's head it pretty much just gave up and we stuffed it in a box and hauled it to Audubon. I'm not sure what happened to it after that; they probably kept it for a week or two and released it once its apparently injured wing was healed. It was an interesting day.

pvaldes7• 4 years ago

Yep, but fishes will reproduce also until finding some equilibrium. Koi ponds need special needs but non-fish ponds are a very good choice and much better for wildlife.

stevage• 4 years ago

Pleasantly surprised to see the promised "small" ponds are indeed small.

tony_cannistra• 4 years ago

The pond is fun and beautiful, but the wildlife videography in this video makes it totally worth watching.

voisin2• 4 years ago

Is there some way of determining how deep you’d have to dig for water to naturally fill it faster than it evaporated away?

elihu6• 4 years ago

I don't think depth matters that much, except that with a deeper pond you have less risk of it drying out completely in a dry season.

More important is: how much rain do you get, how warm is your climate, what is the average humidity, is the pond well sealed, and does the pond collect runoff from the surrounding area?

I'm in Oregon. I made a pond during the pandemic that's probably about 1500 gallons, and about 3 1/2 feet deep at the deepest. When it gets hot and dry in the summer I have to add a couple inches of water maybe every couple weeks, but for the rest of the year I don't add anything at all.

(I tend to get a fair bit of silt runoff in the pond during the winter, because some of the ground nearby drains into the pond.)

voisin2• 4 years ago

I’m in the Rockies. The vast majority of our annual rainfall comes in the form of snow and then a short melt that leads to a late spring to late fall that is quite dry and warm. I’ve got 5 acres and would love to dig a pond to attract wildlife.

Based on what you say, I think the keys for me would be 1) digging it at the bottom of the property and building a berm On the low side to collect as much snowmelt as possible 2) digging it deep enough to hit clay to ensure it is well sealed 3) adding some shade plantings to minimize evaporation

Did you find any good resources before you dug yours?

culi2• 4 years ago

Yeah just check your water level. If you have an area where the water level is already really high, you can get away with just digging

Otherwise you'll have to add clay or use techniques like gleying.

Or you can do it the easy way and use plastic like in the video. Just make sure it's not biodegradable plastic. That'd be the fastest route to a microplastic polluted pond you can take

aliswe2• 4 years ago

Sepp Holzer uses pigs to "waterproof" his ponds. They roam around and eventually compress the earth. And he famously said, if you don't have pigs, you will have to do the pigs' work!

Laremere• 4 years ago

What matters is the depth to your water table. This site seems like a good resource: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-can-i-find-depth-water-table-s...

Note that the water table in that case would only fill the pond to the depth of the water table. Otherwise the surface of your pond will flow out into the water table.

The other strategy (as used in this video) is to instead cut off flow with ground water. In that case, what matters is whether more water flows in on the surface (rain, creeks, what have you) verses evaporation and any leakage.

pvaldes7• 4 years ago

Priorities.

When you design deep you must take in mind first: safety.

Ponds with too vertical sides can be very dangerous for toddlers and pets.

Evaporation depends on climate, shadow location, covering of the surface by plants, rains and extra income of new water. In very dry places with minimum work, you could desire a temporal pond, and let it dry naturally each year. If you want fishes and live in an arid place use killies, specially the native species. Take in mind that fishes in a pond are totally optional.

Carps are normally too big and behave as a bunch of piglets so better not in very small ponds. If your water is cold and from snow take a look to the (non american) Tanichthys albonubes. If you live in UK use crucians and Gasterosteus

jp0d• 4 years ago

I watched this yesterday after a friend recommended it. Very nice videography with the birds footage. Also he handled the feral cat situation quite humanely.

wiradikusuma• 4 years ago

Wow. This is like playing simulation games but in the real. It takes a lot of patience, but this guy seems to know what he's doing so it's worth it!

virgulino• 4 years ago

Another interesting project would be to monitor how much wildlife the cat will kill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

jdkee• 4 years ago

I believe the author mentioned that the cat was adjusting to life indoors.

aliswe2• 4 years ago

It was quite malnourished so I'm guessing it didn't catch much.

matheusmoreira2• 4 years ago

I will never look at cats the same way again.

pluijzer• 4 years ago

I once found a huge trail of lemmings outside leading up to my cat. Quite difficult feeling for somebody who loves cats and also all other creatures. Luckily the cat has fully adjusted now for an indoor live.

sendfoods• 4 years ago

Is there anything a cat owner can do, when having an indoor cat isn't an option? Some kind of collar that produces noise maybe?

voakbasda• 4 years ago

You can put a wide-ruffled, brightly-colored collar (with a bell) on the cat. My wife found one on Etsy for our little fluffy hunter, and the combo of noise/color allows the birds to hear/see him coming and skedaddle.

ovi256• 4 years ago

Yes, a collar with a bell reduced predation by cats, and is recommended by the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, among others.

Now, to be fair, it is not without its cost. It happens that cats get it tangled in fences or other obstacles and die by strangulation or predation.

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

Probably none? Sounds like they brought her in to live indoors…

kls0e• 4 years ago

That's super beautiful. Many thanks!

vfistri2• 4 years ago

One of the most inspiring "small" things a man can do. On a side note It really shows the guy doing this video is fully enjoying what he does.

pvaldes7• 4 years ago

The best part of my garden, by a mile. If you enjoy wildlife and have a boring coin in a sunny place just do it.

I built a wildlife pond [video]

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