I Built a Wildlife Pond (Day 1 vs Day 100)

Folks at home welcome back to the Crimson Oak Pond and we just passed the 100 day mark on our latest Pond project where we turn this dried up prom Pond into this beautiful 30,000g Oasis it's got cascading waterfalls aquatic plants tropical lies and an abundance of life and after we built it a variety of new species moved in and now call this place home with a variety of fish toads and frogs bald eagles ospre and much much more and the thing I love most about these Aquascape ecosystems is you get an up close look at a variety of different animals and you get to watch them in their natural environment and this Pond will also create a lot of new life as you'll be seeing here shortly in this video but this was by far one of my favorite Pond builds and spanned over the course of several weeks and it took a lot of Machinery Manpower and some very talented Pond Builders working together to create this beauty but just in case you missed the original Pond build I'll give you a quick recap so it all began by removing the sludge out of the original prom Pond and then we started getting deliveries and as you've probably noticed this Pond is primarily built out of huge Boulders and Cedar and oak logs and our favorite stone is called an aqua blue stone so we hauled in 100 tons of this Stone from Wisconsin to Alabama and after Ed sketched out the pond schematic it was time to get started with the excavation so my goal was to make the pond around 5T deep to give the fish plenty of places to hide from those Predators like the bald eagles and ospre so after the excavation we added the liner and geotextile material and then started using logs to set the Pond's edge with Fallen trees from right here on the farm and we mixed in some cedar stumps to give it that natural pond look and also added a few fish dorms or caves for those little guys to hide out but a big portion of this project was finding the right trees and logs and stumps and Hauling them out of the woods over to the pond site and then reshaping the dirt work next up we built the Wetland filter which is an oversized filtration system and we pump water from the main body of the pond through the bottom of this Wetland filter and that water gets filtered as it rises up through the aqua blocks and rocks and then splashes down through the waterfall back to the pond that's a wrap for today got the big tree set and some of the ston work in place right there also got some of the piping in place for the Jets that are going to come up throughout the bottom of the pond got the post set for the dock and as we got further along with the project more and more of the aquacap crew came out to help and that's when mother nature threw us a curveball and it rained for 3 days straight and it didn't really slow progress down much but as you'll see later in the video all the rain and extra mud that washed down into the pond created some issues in weeks to come and during this phase of the project we had multiple things going on at once some people Excavating the waterfall area others setting stones and Big Tree Trunks and we had to go find the perfect curved log to set right at the base of the beach area to help help hold some of that sand in and keep it from washing into the pond and after we got that set it was time to deliver the sand and the one thing we do have an abundance of here in South Alabama is that beautiful white beach sand and we knew going into it there was a good chance the truck would get stuck so we hooked him up to some of the equipment and pulled him out and we had one crew focused on building a dock we also wanted to duplicate the same look we had with a 5 acre Pond and now it was time to begin setting the waterfall Stones once the bottom layer of the pond was finished we decided to fill it up with water and give it a good rinsing and wash some of that dirt out so at this point we were about 3 quarters of the way done we had to finish out the waterfall and also do the landscaping and we only had 2 days left to finish it we made some trips down into the swamp on the property to gather some aquatic plants including Ferns and mosses and local plants that we know will thrive in this area and with time running out we started working well into the night with a primary focus of finishing up the waterfall while the rest of the people worked on landscaping and we finally made it to the final day of the pond build and there's a lot of moving pieces and a lot going on today so we're finishing out the Landscaping with some sod around the pond and that's really going to help lock that loose dirt in and I've learned from projects in the past anytime you build a pond erosion is your worst enemy not only does it wash loose dirt down into the pond but you also have to pump it back out but I've just shown you a quick glimpse of all the hard work that was done and my hats off to the aquacap team I'm always amazed at how fast they work and the incredible things they can create and with all Pond builds you have to save the best for last and that's the waterfall and as you can see it's a perfect combination of the cedar logs and boulders and it has that natural look like you see with those Fallen logs and creeks and streams everywhere so there's a quick Glimpse at how we turned my dried up prom pond into a beautiful 30,000g Aquascape recreational Pond but this is where all the work ends and the Real Story begins when all the different varieties of wildlife move into the new Pond and call it home and some of the first arrivals were the frogs and toads they're always attracted to the sound of flow in water and then we have one of our local favorites the owl that we call Hooter stop by to check it out but we got the ultimate stamp of approval when the bald eagle stopped by to take a drink out of the pond that's when you know done a good job and back during the pond build when we were adding some structure to the Wetland filter we specifically added one of the Ceder branches and hopes that it would become an eagle perch and so I got pretty excited the first time I saw the eagle land on the perch I'd have to say that's Majestic and from time to time we'll have random dogos stop by and take a quick bath in the pond and as you can see here even play around in a little bit of the beach sand he's having a good time but the bald eagles are aren't the only ones we've got a big variety of birds that typically fly in right here around the beach area a lot of them will have a bird bath right there including the Osprey as well as a group of crows and anytime you have frogs toads and tadpoles it's going to draw the snakes in and now that we've seen the wildlife that enjoy the pond above water let's take a look at what swims beneath so we started out by adding a pair of Tiger Bass that had just spawned out of the 5 AC Pond and we named these little guys Johnny and June and Johnny and June had an immediate connection anywhere you saw one of them the other one was right beside so the next thing to do was stock it full of bait fish so we added a th golden shiners and we didn't want this one to just be a bass pond so we wanted to add a variety of species including these two rainbow trout that we call Mike and Molly trout and we're not as familiar with rainbows this far south so the one thing I was very surprised about is how aggressive a rainbow trout can be and one day I was walking the edges of the five acre Pond and I saw some bass fry that had just hatched that day and I was able to catch one of the little guys and we added him to the Wetland filter and decided to name him Truman and next up were three tilapia that we added for one very specific reason tilapia are great at cleanup Duty and they will constantly eat algae so they got to work right away and have helped us keep the pond clean and with our 5 acre Pond we lined it with Clay so I was never able to add crawfish to it but with this particular Pond and the geotextile material and the thick liner there's no concerns with crawfish burrowing through them so we caught some down at the creek dropped them in and haven't seen them since and you cannot have a pond without having turtles so one of our subscribers brought over four baby turtles a couple of red ear sliders and the other two were yellow belly sliders and they fit right in with the rest of the crew it's fun watching them either hanging out around the beach area but when we first put them in they were a little skittish but they warmed up to us a little now and anytime you have four turtles there's no better name than the Ninja Turtles and as I mentioned earlier there was a lot of mud that got washed into the pond during the construction and initially I was having trouble with it because it was getting trapped in the Wetland filter beneath tons of rocks but I finally found the best method to remove all that dirt and mud by draining the pond down and then pumping High volumes of water from the main body of the pond and then also placing a second pump in the cleanout pipe which allows you to pump water out of the base of the Wetland filter and as you can see that's where all that mud and dirt was trapped so after we pumped the muddy water out for 2 to 3 hours we got everything completely rinsed out of there and we're finally able to achieve that Crystal Clear Water next up we installed some irrigation to keep all the plant life happy but one of the most valuable additions to this entire Pond project was this 25 ft drain because like I mentioned erosion can be the worst enemy of a new Pond and as you'll see here in this video we get a lot of water flow right down into this area so the drain is Right Where The Red Arrow is and as all that water flows down into the drain it redirects it around this new Pond underground and drains it into the 5 acre Pond where we want it to go so this one drain has saved us a lot of headaches but my favorite part about having that crystal clear water is you get to see what goes on beneath the surface and I couldn't have been more excited when I saw Johnny and June spawning right there at the base of some lily pads because in all my years of having bass as pets we've never had a successful spawn but as you can see we've got dozens of little baby bass and there's one of those little baby turtles checking them out so at this point the pond was looking great but I got a call from Greg the pond guy he wanted to add some finishing touch by planting some aquatic lies and the interesting thing about aquatic lies is they only last one year so after they die off this winter they won't be returning next spring but they do fit in perfect with this Pond they look great and grow fast and another cool thing about these some of them bloom during the daytime and others Bloom at night and the last fish addition to this Pond was our pet bass that we call Tiger he was the first bass that we ever caught out of the 5 acre Pond and we raised him up in a 300-gallon aquarium and he quickly became friends with Johnny and June and after adding that third bass to the mix we were able to start seeing their competitive nature and it's one of my personal favorite things to see those top water blowups so they would team up together and pin those school and golden shiners into a shallow pocket and then attack got to love seeing that and we were happy to see that the little bass fry that we added to the Wetland filter named Truman survived and was doing good so we started experimenting with different foods and one day we were very surprised to see a second bass show up and we have no idea how we got in there so we decided to name him Houdini so we'll feed him little small Shad crickets and worms they're fun to watch and today's video is brought to you by element after long hot days out here at the farm it's important to stay hydrated and in our previous videos you've seen the drink mix hydration packs but element is excited to announce a new way to stay 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gotten the full update on the 30,000g pond we call Cedar Falls let's go check in on the 5 acre Pond that we call the Crimson Oak so every time I get a chance I like to come out here right when the sun's setting and toss some shiners off the dock and watch some of the feeding action and I'll have to say during the peak of the summer you're going to be seeing some aggression some of these bass will go airborne and not even let the Shiner hit the water but while we're feeding them I did want to talk about one concern I'm having with the bass in the 5 acre pond so later in this video you'll see some of the fish catches and every time we catch one of the bass we weigh it and record it in a database and I was starting to get a little concerned because some of the weights on the fish are actually dropping rather than going up and there may not be any need for concern because typically in the spring the bass weigh the most and then after the female spawn they lose a good portion of that weight but I was just hoping that by the beginning of July they would have recovered that weight and possibly added some on but one of the main reasons that I've kept that database is because it'll give me an Insight on problems and hopefully I can catch them and correct the problem before it gets too big and out of hand so for instance when you have bass that aren't putting on weight it could be a few different things they could start overcrowding so we may have to start removing some of them out of the pond it could also mean a shortage of bait fish but I don't think that's the problem because we have an abundance of thread fin Chad plenty of bluegill a big population of baby tilapia and then we also supplement the prawns in but the one unknown and potential mistake I made was adding the rainbow trout in this past fall I think I underestimated how aggressive they were and so it is possible that the rainbow trout put a big dent in their food source and they're still recovering from that but I'm going to keep monitoring it and if I need to we'll stockpile the bait in until we start seeing those weights come back up but one other thing I suspect it could be is the size of the bait that these bass prefer and I watch them a lot at night and they'll swim along with the bluegills and don't really seem to be interested in attacking them so I think they're primarily targeting a lot of these smaller Bait fish and it just takes a lot more of them to keep them full so for example here's a quick clip of them at night and the bluegill do not seem to be threatened at all and if you pay close attention I think some of these bass are eating little water bugs and mosquitoes off the surface of the water so if they're wasting energy on those small returns that could be part of the problem and that's why I'm confused because if you saw in the last video there is an abundance of bait in this pond so this one does have me scratching my head a little so I also started monitoring The Fish Feeding cameras because if you know anything about a bass they love an easy meal so the one time I think they would be interested in eating bluegills is when the feeders go off and they know they can easily go up there and attack one so if you watch closely there are a couple of big bass hits usually you'll see the bluegill pop up in the air so maybe things are starting to make a turn cuz I know if the bass are eating Blu gills they're going to put on weight quick there's also probably some tilapia mixed in this group and now that we've got bass in the three and 4 lb range they should be big enough to start eating some of those adult tilapia but speaking of food source I'm always trying to add new varieties so let's check in on the prawns and some of these guys have gotten big so we got a heavy dose of protein pellets every day and I think last year by August and September we had started moving some of them into the 5 acre Pond and doing some feedings and now these little guys have gotten big enough each time I drop some pellets in they go over and grab an individual pellet but these guys are aggressive and fight over food so they'll try to steal each other's pellets the life of a prawn is a tough one all right I've been trying to find a good way to feed the prawns out here when I'm gone and I finally found a pretty cool little invention here so you preload each of these little slots with the protein pellets and I'll give you a quick demonstration by putting it in manual here basically it slides that little green door open and then indexes over one slot and drops the prawn food in perfect pretty cool little invention there so as long as the raccoons don't come over here and steal all the food prawns get fed every day but here's an interesting clip I got at night if you see where that red arrow was pointing there's a little mouse right out there on the beach area you can see the little shining eyes and he settled right over there on that log and if you look over to the left you'll see a snake easing up to him and the snake is very smart you see him get off the side and then come up through the crease of the side so he can use that to hide his approach and the interesting thing is he was getting really close and I'm not sure if he lost sight of the mouse or either wants to Circle back around but he aborts the mission and makes a big circle and at this point the mouse hops away and the snake does come back and lifts his head up to see if he's still there he waited too late and so the snake heads back to what's probably his home and goes for a swim in the pond so now we're going to take a trip on the back end of the pond dam down into the swamp and I don't come back here too often because it's really grown up but we're thinking about improving the land this fall and cutting some Trails through to make it accessible but today I'm going to head deep into the swamp and put some cameras out so we'll see what's lurking around down here but it stays wet most of the year and this is where we got a lot of our aquatic plants from and we got a spider that just caught a horse fly for lunch so I made it down here to the creek this is where we put the crawfish traps out in the past we've still got some flowing water and then I found this nice open space that looks like it could be a crossing of the creek so hopefully there's a big variety of animals coming through this area so I got some cameras set out here one set out over there got the old cwad holes look at all the ferns out there man that's pretty and first up we got a young bucking velvet you can always tell when they came from the swamp with that mud on their feet and a nanny crossing the creek MrGeorge Cooney so that's all we had today we'll keep an eye on these cameras and hopefully you'll see something cool coming up so I was out here checking in on the pond today and look what we have over here in the beach area looks like we have a little spaw in bed my guess is the tilapia they spawn every 21 days so hopefully we'll be seeing some baby tilapia here that'll also help feed the bass but in the meantime we're going to stock 2,000 gold golden shiners we got one size here that's a little bit smaller and then this other bag is a little bit bigger that we'll be using to feed off the dock some I'm about to release these and you can see the fish ready that's tiger I and a few of the others that are left in the pond should get to see some good feeding action I always like to dump them in the waterfall area because it's high and dissolved oxygen and that's what these little guys need the most right when you put them in and it's just a Shiner buffet for the bass they just sit right there at the base of the waterfall and let the current bring them right into their mouth so I put an underwater camera right here just so you could see the speed of a large mouth the shiners do not have a chance so with all this feeding activity I got to catch a couple for Truman and Houdini Truman hey little buddy man I really love the look of these tropical lies up here probably something I'm going to start adding every year and could potentially even add some down in the 5 acre Pond also makes a perfect habitat for these two little bass let's try to feed one to Houdini so I put some underwater cameras down in Cedar Falls and if you pay close attention to these school and golden shiners you'll see that one fish in particular doesn't match the rest and that's one of those little bass fry from Johnny and June has grown up a little and he's the exact size of the golden shiners right now there's another good look at them but that's why a lot of these small bass fry don't make it to adulthood because they end up getting eaten by bigger fish even bass because they look just like the rest of their bait so Liz planted a garden this year and Oliver is her biggest fan every time she gets some vegetables out of the garden but anytime she has any that get too big rather than wasting them she chops them up and feeds them to the wildlife so we'll put some on the peanut picnic table and some over here at the squirrel house and let's see what they like the crow chose the watermelon that's a cool shot the primary resident of the squirrel house is the mouse we call Gus Gus and he is protecting his house from any Intruders love seeing that and Little Gus Jr bringing some of the squash into the house later that night we also had a salamander make his first appearance and gusgo had a long day protecting his house it's time for bed all right got a little afternoon thunderstorm fish should be biting so we're going to catch a few and use this scanner to scan them and see if they've been tagged before if they hadn't been tagged we'll inject a pit tag get a weight on them we're going to try out some top water with the Whopper plopper and the spinner bait got him right off the antenna all righty it's a good one all right this fish is 697 36 and it weighs 2. 07 and this fish is named swim Shady slight decrease in weight over a few weeks nothing major to worry about here got always pulling drag there's a nice large mouth that one may be pushing three lbs all right this fish is 56961 0 2.

57 so this is really interesting this is one of the Florida strain bass that we put in back in February and this particular bass weighed almost 3 lb but it was full of eggs and ready to spawn so it's slightly concerning that it's lost some weight but if it doesn't put it back on in the next few months then I think we'd have a problem there we go over that grass a little thicker all right this fish has been called and it's 57148 and it weighs 2. 24 lb now we got flipper here with some good weight gain that's what we're looking to see so the reason all these fish are right here in this pocket is if you remember that's the deepest part of the pond right there 12 ft deep got a big brush pile down there and then this year for the first time ever grass started growing right here along these Banks so the bass are just sitting down there deep feeding up here shallow as those sh swim by guaranteed to get a bite on that one we go top water bite everyy one's been right there at the bank nope it has been caught 5 s1111 it weighs 1. 54 and xerx here lost some weight but it could have been postpone with that little bit of difference it's nothing major a little bitty guy man this may be the smallest one I've ever caught this year definitely a second or third generation bass but he is aggressive like the little guy got him right here this little rain just started they're biking good this looks like a good one oh yeah good bite right out here in the rain all right this fish is 5705 89 and it weighs 2.

55 nice one and this fish is ultra and has been staying right there around that 2 and 1/2 lb the last few times we caught it there we go what we got here little guy it's a healthy fish got a little wound right there on his bottom the one where the sore has been caught 69984 and it weighs 1.