Outdoor Pond – Tips For Building A Wildlife Pond
The most popular type of outdoor pond is without a doubt a fish pond, with clean waters and filters. The much less common option, requesting a more adventurous spirit, is to build a wildlife outdoor pond.
Let’s try to define a wildlife pond. Such a pond can be viewed as an environment that naturally sustains itself. A part of your garden where you are mostly an observer and you let nature take care of the rest.
Main steps to create a wildlife outdoor pond:
1. Wildlife need undisturbed access to your pond, select a spot by the edge of your backyard, close to nature.
2. Build your pond as described below.
3. Place naturally rich water into it.
4. Don’t interfere, just make sure the right conditions are there.
5. Eventually the environment will take care of the rest.
What can you expect? Well, if you take care of the details, you will have an autonomous ecosystem filled with a variety of living creatures and with little need for maintenance at all.
Building a wildlife pond. A wild life pond is built using any informal outdoor pond plans, but your equipment list will be smaller as there is no need for filtration or aeration, nature will take care of this tasks. An important point to add is that fish will destroy your insect population, the basic food for other wildlife animals, so this kind of pond won’t host any kind of fish in it.
The best place to locate your wildlife pond is at an edge of your backyard, as close as possible to nature. But avoid problems, far from your house and neighbors property as the pond will attract insects, toads and other animals.
Leave the area around the pond untidy, high vegetation can be a nice hiding spot to animals you want to attract.
The secret elixir of life. Find an existing wildlife pond, a better option is a naturally occurring one, and borrow a small quantity of “dirty water”. The contents of this water will introduce naturally occurring organisms that will populate your pond.
What kind of creatures will you attract? The water you took from a natural pond will kick start a rich population of insects. First comers will probably be pond skaters later followed by dragonflies. The next step is the arrival of toads, frogs and birds, the insect predators. You can buy toads and snails and introduce them to your pond, but make sure to keep the balance of your ecosystem. If the mosquito population starts to get out of control, you can add snails to keep them water clean of their eggs.
Backyard ponds can be found in a large variety, and we know that wildlife is not the common choice, but if properly executed a wildlife pond can be a magical spot in your backyard.