If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that many of our posts regard the criteria for pond that will be home to a specific family of animal. Thus far, we've described ponds for turtles, bass, frogs, dragonflies, and snails. Today's post is about a different class of animal: avian. More specifically, it is about ponds built for ducks! This article will describe exactly what ducks need in a pond, and how to design a pond where your feathered fowl can thrive. Click 'Read more' down at the right to learn what makes an ideal duck pond... Filtration Easily the biggest challenge with designing and owning a duck pond is achieving adequate filtration. A standard ecosystem pond designed for koi will quickly become overloaded with waste when ducks are introduced. To effectively handle a load of ducks, you'll definitely want to have a wetland or bog filter. This uses plants and bacteria to naturally utilize the excess nitrates in the duck detritus as nutrients for growth. Deciding how large to make your wetland depends on the number of ducks and the size of the pond. A typical fish pond will have a wetland averaging about 10% of the pond's surface area. For ducks, you'll want it sized between 30-50% of the pond's surface area. That may sound like a lot, but consider how the typical environment where ducks thrive is full of reeds and cattails. That doesn't happen by accident, those reeds grow so well because the ducks provide them plenty of fertilizer. It's been discovered that the best plants for using in the wetlands of a duck pond are reeds and cattails. Due to their density and vertical growth, they use the greatest amount of nitrates relative to the area they occupy. Skimmers Skimming is another essential component to a duck pond. You'll want to do everything you can to minimize the amount of organic debris that enters the water. A skimmer will capture fallen leaves before they can sink and sludge up your pond. For the minimal required maintenance, we suggest using an intake cove instead of a skimmer box. This is an area of the pond with a narrow inlet and a drain that will collect any leaves and debris that fall in the pond, to be scooped or raked out periodically, usually about once a week in the spring/summer, increasing in frequency as needed in the autumn. An added benefit of a skimming system is it will help aerate and remove toxic gasses from the water. This brings us to our next topic: Oxygenation. Aeration When designing a professional-quality duck pond, achieving excellent aeration is essential to maintaining water quality and reducing maintenance. We recommend a multi-faceted approach to aeration utilizing a stream/waterfall, multiple high-powered aerators, and even underwater jets, like those in a hot tub, to move stagnant water and break the sediment into smaller particles that can be more easily handled by your pump. When designing the waterfall, the goal is to maximize the agitation of the water. Use plenty of rocks and drops to break the surface tension of the water and create bubbles, this does a fantastic job of aerating the water. A waterfall and stream, however perfectly executed, will still require supplemental aeration to achieve a proper duck pond. There should also be several aerators around the pond in areas that are away from the waterfall and have more turbid water. These aerators will introduce bubbles at the bottom of your pond, which helps aerate the bottom of the pond and moves stagnant water from the bottom of the pond up to the surface where it can come into contact with the air. Aerators work great in a vertical water column, but to really maximize their benefit, you'll want some underwater jets to supplement them by pushing water across the bottom of the pond into the streams of bubbles the aerators create. Impacts ducks may have on a backyard pond:
Helpful Notes: • Success with your duck pond depends on selecting the correct pump. We recommend using a solids-handling pump to assist with the enormous amounts of duck muck. To select the right size pump, follow the manufacturers suggestions based on pond size, and err on the larger side. • Plant selection is important. The best choices will be plants native to your area that will extract duck excrement from the water and thrive on it: reeds, iris, cattails. Aside from your filter plants, it's good to include some edible plants such as duckweed, pickerel, wild celery and arrowhead. • Vary the edges. You never see a perfectly circular pond ringed by identically-sized rocks in nature, so don't build your pond that way and expect it to perform as a natural pond. You may want to include a sandy beach-area so the ducks can casually walk in and out of the pond. This area can be set up with a nice lounge chair and umbrella where you can relax and be near your ducks. • Include an island or some larger rocks in the center of the pond that will give the ducks a safe place to go when they feel threatened. This will help keep them safe should a fox or coyote get in your yard. For an inside view of the duck pond building process, check out the following video by our fellow CAC, Mike Gannon of Full Service Aquatics: Good Luck and Happy Ponding!
4 Comments
Mansoor Ahmad
6/20/2018 02:16:27 am
very convencing video for the construction of duck pond.We have a project of duct pond where we need complete design including E/M and
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tuvia
11/24/2020 04:03:40 am
what base do you suggest i use for a round duck pond surrounding an island ? the island is approx 6-8 diameter.
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CHRISTINE Moyer
10/23/2021 10:52:25 am
What a wonderful demonstration. Thank you for sharing. Just wish you had gone into how to build the bog a bit more as that seems to be our area of concern! Cheers!
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Lisa
3/23/2022 08:25:24 am
Using this Whitewater Septic Air pump how is the air dispersed in the water? Do you have pads on the bottom of the pond? Does this also act as a a filtration device?
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AuthorLandvista Aquascapes provides Pond & Water Feature Design, Installation & Maintenance -Repair services for South New Jersey Homeowners Archives
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