I built a wildlife pond [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
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:
Regarding mosquitoes: this is not standing water, because of the pump which goes year-round. I also believe the fish will eat most bugs and any larvae that start to form. they seem to be constantly hungry. Except in the fall and winter.
Mosquito dunks are one way to deal with mosquito larvae without resorting to a conventional pesticide. Another is to have some kind of fish. Mosquito fish are probably best. I think koi/goldfish tend to eat them too.
https://summitchemical.com/products/mosquito-dunks/
Taro needs to be moved indoors for the winter if you're in a cold climate. Water hyacinth and water lettuce also don't survive winter. I don't think frogbit does, but regardless apparently it's considered invasive where I am (Oregon) so the pond/garden supply places don't sell it anymore.
Azolla (aka fairy moss or mosquito fern) can survive the winter. It turns red when it freezes, but it starts multiplying again when it warms up.
Cattail and hardy water lily can regrow from the roots. Same with water clover.
Duckweed is similar to azolla, but does not survive in winter. If you buy water plants, you may end up with duckweed that went along for the ride.
We had a lotus, it came back after one winter, but didn't survive the next. (Our last spring was very wet and cold, and lotus apparently like hot weather and sun.)
Incidentally, if anyone reading this is in the general vicinity of the Willamette valley, I highly recommend visiting Hughes Water Gardens in Wilsonville if you get the chance. It's a plant nursery, but they sell mostly aquatic plants, and also pond supplies and koi.
Different category. Taro is a marginal, it adds \vspace. Can be substituted by Iris or Pontederia.
Avoid water hyacinth and water lettuce in small ponds. They will conquer all the surface and became a nuissance. They also will block you from watching the fishes.
> Mosquitoes
The worse ones dislike moving waters, this problem can be alleviated if you use a pump to move the water at a regular interval. Take in mind that water lilies dislike also moving water so you need to choose
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.
That’s funny, because out here (California) the raccoons will take other food to the water and stand in it while eating. They stand on the steps of pools and dunk their food - presumably to wash it off - between nibbles.
Quite funny to see, and leaves some hilarious paw prints if your pool isn’t clean.
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.
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.
Occasionally I make the mistake of going to it in a browser without aggressive ad blocking and it's miserable.
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?
YouTube used to be totally different, also it was free with very unintrusive ads. It's hard to sell people on the current monetization model and a lot of the current practices to get you to pay just antagonize viewers. The content is also not always perceived to be worth your money.
There are also moral issues, like Youtube showing ads on demonitized videos, or on channels that don't qualify for monetization. Meaning not all creators even benefit from YouTube's ads.
But eventually it boils down to user experience. You can block ads and get a massively better experience for free, or pay to have an OK experience (sponsor block isn't included in YouTube premium).
Patreon is OK for some things but you have to be very passionate about what this creator is doing to spend the time (besides money) to follow and consume their content on an additional platform.
I completely and fully respect people who choose to do this, but as a more casual YouTube user who just wants to see a video once in a while from one of my subscribed channels, this is not something I am going to do personally.
To each their own but personally I feel as if ads and sponsor blocking is the best experience you can get at this time, and it doesn't cost you anything. It's a hard deal to beat.
Producer pays for content and profit is derived from distributers that charge for access to the content. If people don't view money is lost.
YouTube is different:
Creators pay to create their own content and are imbursed as they gain views.
YouTube, the distributer in this case, has no skin in the game. They have no overhead, it's all profit.
Perhaps that has something to do with it. It feels somehow like you're paying the middle man for nothing?
But I definitely can see the dystopia in an algorithmic platform seeking content hegemony at highest possible profit as opposed to how traditional firms work which is... not too different to me. But I can see a higher ceiling to the gray goo problem in the notoriously willing-to-be-bad-at-customer-service Google.
And in the case of YouTube the answer seem to be: we created and refined some amazing video compression and streaming techniques. Now that that's done we just want to profit indefinitely?
I have just about zero warm and fuzzy feelings towards big corporations. But to claim that Youtube's giant infrastructure its development and maintenance has no cost (zero overhead) is totally wrong.
Well, this requires numbers. Like percentage. Do you have any or it is just an assumption?
Are they unreasonable assumptions in your eyes? May I ask why? They seem reasonable to me.
Anyhow, if we assume storage costs for YouTube are the same as what AWS charges per month (roughly 2 cents), this would mean that it costs YT about $2.4 billion per year just to store those 10 exabytes. I'm assuming that Google can cost its storage at quite a bit cheaper than 2 cents per GB at the immense scale it operates on, so let's halve that. This still means simple storage costs of $1.2 billion per year.
These of course don't include hardware replacement, other capital costs, or the bandwidth costs of all that video being uploaded (and downloaded).
Youtube's revenues for 2019 (so a bit out of date) were nearly 16 billion (2), so while they certainly have lots of costs beyond what I described above, they're also wonderfully profitable it seems.
1 https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/9018/estimate-tot...
2 https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...
They also promote your content and find and auction off ads for you. Unless if you're an advertiser, you aren't paying YouTube anything. If you have a problem with it, you're free to host your content on another platform. Keep in mind that that YouTube has to serve the hundreds of millions of videos that get a handful of views, and if you're a monetized YouTuber, it's only fair to be taxed to pay for hosting these videos as everyone starts in that position.
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.)
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?
I don't know how much water you'd lose from soil percolation; I've always just used a liner. EPDM rubber is what most people use. It's not terribly expensive and can be purchased in surprisingly large continuous sheets, or multiple sheets can be glued together if you want to go even bigger.
I keep koi in my pond. Koi have particular requirements with respect to aeration and filtration and depth. If you're just building a general purpose pond those aren't as much of an issue. Be aware that if you use herbicides or pesticides that you don't want to end up in the pond, then you probably shouldn't design the pond to capture the maximum amount of runoff.
You'll probably want to at least get some mosquito fish to keep mosquitoes under control. Mosquito dunks are another solution -- they're these floating things you toss in the pond that contain a bacteria that's specifically harmful to mosquito larvae.
Some pond plants can survive a freeze (cattail, azolla, lily pads, horse tail) whereas others don't (water lettuce, water hyacinth, taro). I'll usually buy a clump or two of water lettuce and water hyacinth in the spring, and then by the end of summer I have so much I have to fish it out of the pond to keep it from taking over completely.
To expand on this, if anyone is interested in water hyacinth: it is beautiful, but if you want it in your ponds, you _will_ have to clear it out by hand at some point. It grows unbelievably quickly, and if left unattended it will happily suffocate everything else in the pond.
I'm not sure what resource the plants are competing for. Phosphorous maybe?
Gardener's patience.
I would suggest avoiding all four, as many time as possible.
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
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.
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