My goldfish pond

[CometKeith]

I started the bird thread so feel free to chat about birds there! I am going to try to control myself and save the rest of my bird anecdotes for that thread. JW,CE and iscd71, neat stuff about Bald Eagles. I think I have only seen one once in the wild, but not anywhere close to Chicago. To think they were endangered species not too many years ago and their population was going down fast.Here is some interesting info on them: http://www.baldeagleinfo.com/eagle/eagle11.html

 

[callingcolleen1]

Forgot to mention that I can't get a picture of the connecting ponds cause their spread out over a large area. About the bald eagles, I see them quite often here in Medicine Hat, Just outside of town by the river sometimes. One time a bald eagle hovered overhead, while I was waking with my big dogs. I seen that before with other pretatory birds, they like to hang around while I walk the dogs and wait for them to scare up a rabbit!

 

[j.w]

Ketih nice article on the Eagles and wouldn't it have been great to see the large amounts of them gathered on the rivers way back when they were so plentiful!

 

[callingcolleen1]

Hey Keith, glad you liked my story. Some times I've seen two big bald eagles down by the river. They sit on this old tree that is very large but dead. The dead tree has big branches that are easy to land on. How is your pond doing way down there? Anything new and exciting going on in your pond?

 

[addy1]

Ketih nice article on the Eagles and wouldn't it have been great to see the large amounts of them gathered on the rivers way back when they were so plentiful!

At our house in colorado, the salmon would run up the river. The eagles would line the banks eating their fill. 100's of the birds, it was so neat to see. Also watch them fish the neighbors stocked pond, sweep down and snatch a fish lol

 

[j.w]

Now I wish I lived on a river so I could watch them all the days that they came to feast!

 

[CometKeith]

Callingcolleen1, thanks for asking about my pond. Well most of my fish are doing much better. Some have been really sick and one actually lays sideways on top of the water and then will swim away if I touch it with the net. I brought out a bag to put him in more than once when I thought that was it yet he is still surviving. I think the severe up and downs of temperatures in the spring really hurt my fish and the pond never really had a chance to cycle despite hitting 80 degrees in mid March before it got really cold in April. I think my biggest mistake is adding the free fish I got, but at that point I was planning on going bigger with the pond and it failed to materialize. My ammonia readings are back down to zero with all the water changes I have done. I haven't used any medicines or salt baths on the fish and have just focused on doing everything possible to improve the water quality. So far I have lost only two that I have actually removed myself and my two watonai's are MIA. I think most of them will be okay. Also I added a few more snails,tadpoles, and floating plants the other day and naturally the raccoons got the snails the very first night and made a mess of the pond. Thanks for sharing pictures of your pond. It looks very nice. Addy, it's hard to believe there were half a million Bald Eagles at one point. If you ever have a chance to read about Lewis and Clark's journey they saw a lot of amazing things that weren't even known about back then until they wrote about them and drew pictures of what they saw. http://lewis-clark.o...ArticleID=3051. Wow! we have a lot of bird enthusiasts on gpf. The bird thread is.......taking off! Addy those were amazing pictures that you posted.

 

[callingcolleen1]

Sorry to hear about your sick fish. 20 years ago when I built my first pond, I too had trouble with sick fish. I think it sounds like water quality may have been an issue, but to get a better picture I need to know a few things first:

Do you have plants in your pond, and if so, are they turning yellow at all? Any yellow on the water plants will indicate that ammonia may be present and may have been building for some time.
Do you run your pond all year? If not I assume that you clean it out in the spring and restart the process. Restarting your pond each spring can make balancing the pond more difficult, and that can be the problem that leads to ammonia.
Do you use any chemicals in the yard? (Bug killer, weed killer, etc)
Are the tadpoles doing OK?
Do you think that your pond is overstocked with fish?

A healthy pond will have healthy fish. Last year a blue heron came and ate lots of the small goldfish from the bottom pond. I went to the pet store and got feeder goldfish to replace the ones the heron ate. These fish were not in good shape at all, but when I put them in my pond they improved and are doing great now. They stayed out all winter last year under the ice with the rest of my fish. I have now been wintering my pond in Canada successfully for 20 years.

 

[addy1]

Thanks cometkeith, I have my camera at the ready at all times, never know what is going to show up.

 

[CountryEscape]

Colleen, what do you mean by running a pond all year? I wanted to keep my waterfall running, but with the ice that was forming, I feared it would dam and cause water to go over the edge, so turned off the waterfall, which is also my partial filter for that pond. Thought I was supposed to bring skimmer inside, learned that it could have stayed outside, although if not running, I probably did right by bringing in the pump. I ran a bubbler all winter to keep the pond open.
I have murky water this spring. It was crystal clear until I turned on the waterfall/filter and bog. Took about a week and them BAM, murky water. I was struggling early on (end of Feb. early March) with algae, so stupidly poured small amounts of peroxide on the edges of my pond where the string algae was. Algae is gone, but murky water remains. All my levels are good (ammonia nitrite and nitrate are all zero, but KH and GH are in the 125-200 range, if I recall). Any ideas besides waiting out the beneficial bacteria to kick in, and plants to resume growing well? All plants are growing well now that it warmed up again. Hoping the help of my beneficial bacteria product I used will help clear things up too. Any other suggestions? Oh, and I've cleaned the bottom of that pond 3 times this year, always just bringing up matts of algae, not hardly any muck at all. Someone said not to net the bottom for a while, maybe leave it to grow good bacteria.

 

[CometKeith]

Colleen, There are only two possible causes. One is that March temperatures were substantially warmer than usual and April was substantially less. I think March was about 30 degrees warmer on average than April. We had a run of 8 days in a row at 80 degrees or over in March. In April it barely got above the mid 50's. The fish were very active in March and were eating algae and producing a lot of waste. I make it a policy not to feed my fish until I know the pond has cycled. It was way too early for it to cycle in March and once we hit April the temps went as low as freezing and cycling would be impossible until we averaged at least 55 degrees or above consistently. Even yesterday and today we are barely making temps over mid 50's. In April there was probably quite a bit of bacteria good and bad but the fish could not fight the bad bacteria because their immune system was not up to par because of the low water temperatures. So high ammonia, unhealthy bacteria, lowered fish immunity, and pond not cycled led to a very unhealthy environment. I have actually only lost two fish to disease that I know of have have 13 remaining and two missing. The only other possible cause is that I added several water lies that I bought from Menards in late March. After I placed them in the water I noticed quite a bit of white fertilizer that was floating in the water which i tried to remove the best I could. Is it possible that the fertilizer could have affected the water quality and made the fish sick? Shortly after I added the lilies I noticed some of the fish looking lethargic, but also since the water temperatures were dropping I associated it more with the temperatures than anything else. I also did a test a few weeks ago and found the ammonia levels to be high and I have been doing frequent water changes since then. I had done water changes prior to that but pretty much stopped for a few weeks when it got really cold. My last test showed ammonia to be zero. I think if I had much less bio-load my pond might have been okay and probably adding the extra fish someone gave me was a bad idea, but I think the drastic changes in water temperatures from hot to cold from March to April caused most of the problems. I'm not sure about the fertilizer from the lilies and what affect they may have had. I am welcome to any suggestions. I hate to see the fish pay for my mistakes.

 

[sissy]

I don't fertilize my lilies in the pond I fertilize them when they are in my 300 gallon stock tank and then after a moth I move them to the pond .I don't want to fertilize the algae and help it grow .I have now had to empty the stock tank because I found a dead bird in it and did not want to try to filter that out and I put the 150 gallon stock tank in it's place because that has a built in heater for next winter and the 300 gallon one did not have a heater .Besides that I have it next to my pond and the bigger one got in the way of my filter for the big pond .This is only the second season for my lilies and my lotus plants this is the first season they will be in my pond .

 

[callingcolleen1]

Keith, you sound like you know what your doing. I think you are correct. The spring tempatures here were "all over the board". One day I was in the sun walking around in shorts and feeding fish out of my hand, tulips and plum tree blooming away, the next day it snowed! Smaller ponds will freeze quicker, thats for sure. I have a small pond in the front yard that is only 100 gallons or so and it does freeze much quicker than the much larger (3500 gallon) three ponds system that I run in the back.
I think that dirt from that Lilly added to you woes. Lillys are known to harbor parasites too. Look for Lilly bulbs that are just roots and plant them yourself. There cheaper and grow and better that the ones already potted up.

I leave fish in the back yard outside all year round. The big fish in the top pond have not moved from that pond since 1995. Back then the top pond was the bottom pond but I redug that pond out, built it up and reversed the flow. Never change the water, never disturbed the pond except in spring when I run a net to the bottom and remove some sludge. The top pond never has enough sludge to even bother with, the middle gets a small amount by the filters, but that's about it! By the time it goes thru the big yellow flag marsh, there nothing left of the the leaf litter that fell last fall. I do get lots of leaf litter in the fall but leave lots of that natural material in because it all good for my pond. The good bacteria I put in many years ago need to have something to break down, and the marsh complete with leeches takes care of the rest of the waste. Took me years to get the pond to balance so perfect. Nature is amazing.

 

[callingcolleen1]

Country Escape, what's the weather like down there, does it get very cold? Did it freeze hard last winter?
Run my pond all winter means just that. Don't run the waterfall or spitters. I have water spill ways that drop from the top pond, to the middle pond, and then to the bottom pond. These run all the time, 365 days a year, for the last 20 years. The only time stop the flow is to clean a filter. The winter here gets to minus 45 some times. I heat the pond with a 1500 watt heater I got from Peavy Mart, it's cheap to buy but costly to run. I only heat the pond when its minus 15 c or 0 degrees f. My pond water volume is quite large so it holds its temp longer. I like about two to four inches of ice to cover pond. If you have a stream, the water will still run under the ice, just like a river or stream. There is a very large yellow flag marsh that naturally floats. The yellow flag is a water iris, the plant somehow has latched naturally to the sides of the pond but it so large it naturally floats half in the deep end and the water. The fish love to winter under their. The water ways sometime are completely iced over, but you can hear the water flow under the ice. In the spring when the ice breaks up the iris and other hardy plants grow very, very quick and the bacteria I put in the pond years ago "self seeds". When everybody else is fussing and having problems, my pond could not be better. The only product I buy now is small fish pellets for the baby fish, and the koi eat my dog's food. Have feed the same food to the dogs and fish for darn near 8 years. Never every change the water, just clan filters and top of water. I don't even treat the tap water because the pond volume is so large that topping off the pond with tab water slowly is no problem. I have colonized the marsh areas with leeches and some how the water striders just showed up 10 years ago or so. Love water striders, they look like a big spider that floats on the water and if you have water striders you will never have bugs on your lillys!

 

[CometKeith]

Sissy/Colleen, Thanks for the suggestions. The lilies already had all this fertilizer in the pots that was released when I put them in the water. That's the last time I buy those. My string algae practically exploded the very next day and who knows what it did the the water chemistry. I guess you live and learn. Every time you add anything new to a pond you never know what affect it will have.