porkpal, we were feeding plenty of herons, that's for sure! Our pond is really a blue line stream, and when we bought this place 6 years ago, we bought a used backhoe and spent several months making the stream much deeper. We had to go through corps of engineers, and several other agencies to do it, lotsa red tape. We put in 2 rock dykes so that baby fish could live in the eddies. Right after we decided we had done enough digging, we got rain and more rain. The pond filled, the dam held, and we stocked with thousands of little fish that the biologists recommended. Last year during the drought, we were one of the very few places that still had water. Our neighbors downstream asked us to dredge their waterfront so that kept us busy this winter. Now the water is back up to level, and we're catching bass and catfish again.
Water from one neighbor goes into our bog before it hits an overflow ditch into the pond, and that bog is full of plants I intend to sell some day. the ducks absolutely love it. The other neighbor's water goes into a stand alone pond with overflow, and i have lotus and waterlilies in it. I'm trying to keep the fish out of that one. All in all, we drain over 600 acres, so we have plenty of wildlife at the pond. If the pond were only from geothermal runoff, we could raise trout! Unfortunately, it's fairly muddy from regular runoff.
