Pond Life

Last year we built a pond. The construction process was fairly arduous for a soft northern shite like my good self. (There are various other pictures from the construction process here.)

One year on, I’m really pleased with the way it’s naturalised in, something that owes a great deal to my wife planting lots of things, and very little to me watching her plant lots of things.

A year ago it looked like this:

It now looks like this, or at least it does when it’s been raining heavily:

Best of all it’s full of wildlife, something we only faintly dreamed of one year ago. I’m genuinely amazed at how quickly the local fauna have moved in. They include various frogs and newts, about a million snails, some strange wormy things, and enough insect larvae to stage a 1950s B Movie. Today we encountered this lovely frog which poked its head above water between torrential showers, and obligingly posed for me:

There’s another picture of it here.

We also went out for our regular Newt Watch the other night and discovered a hedgehog quietly snaffling all the dried meal worms we’d put out for the birds. Awwww. Being very soft, we’re now putting out meal worms every night for the hedgehog. EDIT: And it was there tonight.

EDIT2: Huh. The pictures weren’t working with ‘new’ Facebook links, but it’s all fixed now.