OUT of ONE’s DEPTH

Ponds are environments of mystery. What dramas are enacted beneath their tranquil surfaces or even at the surface when one is elsewhere? By definition, they possess something intense, complex, profound: namely, depth. They are separate, contained worlds, by far the greatest part of which we are unable to observe. Yet we are instinctively drawn to them.

When we moved to our present home in the dying years of last century, we inherited a pond. Between us, we mustered pretty limited experience of managing such facilities. How much is there to know? We bought books and read websites. Mostly, we learned hands-on.

The pond was near the house, just across the drive from the conservatory. It was around forty feet long, up to fifteen feet wide and shaped like a peanut shell. It was pretty shallow – if you waded in, the water didn’t reach your knees. And it was choked with weed, notably so-called fish weed (elodea crispa) that I characterised as like soft Christmas tree. We needed to drag out huge clumps at regular intervals, leaving it for some hours at the pond edge so that any aquatic creatures had the chance to slither back to the water.

Blue orfe

Halfway across the narrow middle protruded a rickety wooden jetty from which, on his first day in residence, our second puppy launched himself to his great shock and surprise. Apart from its shape, its shallowness, the jetty and the fish, the other notable feature of the pond was a net stretched across the whole area and supported on slowly rotting wooden posts. This was meant to protect the residents from marauding herons. The previous owner told us that he had had to restock after every fish had been taken.

The pond soon became a source of great pleasure. I affected that watching the fish was more satisfying than watching the telly (and often it was). But it was too near the house, it was too shallow and it was approaching the end of its useful life. We persevered for a few years, never sure how heavily stocked it might be. Occasionally, a fish carcass appeared at the surface. We introduced a few newcomers – shubunkins, comets, ghost koi.

David’s sister gave us a large common carp, grown too big for their own pond. As he had hatching marks on his back, the girls had called him Chubby Checker. Another carp came from a friend’s pond in London, David transporting it all the way by car (it proved a reliable navigator). He was our biggest fish and we called him Big Bill Broonzy. The distinctive members of our aquatic community did, we felt, merit names. We didn’t know how to sex fish and so, with no discriminatory intent, we referred to any fish generically as “him”. But these big guys seemed very hemmed in, sometimes swimming proud of the water.

As essentially a “wild” pond with no filtration, it played host to many creatures aside from fish, especially frogs and newts. For a few nights in the early spring, we would suddenly find the drive and surrounding areas swarming with frogs looking for mates. We had to step carefully then, keeping the dogs on leads and guiding them through the vulnerable amphibians.

The characteristic blue and orange markings of a shubunkin

Already in residence in the pond when we arrived were seven orfe that I liked very much, five golden and two blue, but one summer all but one of each colour died in quick succession. We tried to monitor the water condition but it was tricky. What’s more, herons still visited. I once saw one striding across the pond, flattening the net as it went. The heron is a fine sight, a huge, ungainly bird that seems utterly out of place in an English garden. We once had one perching on the roof, like a Hitchcockian threat. We referred to successive visiting herons generically as Ron. Whether any Ron managed to hoik any fish under or – horrid thought – through the net was hard to tell, as we never had a stock inventory. But occasionally frogs or birds would get fatally entangled in the net and it became much holed. The pond was clearly unsatisfactory.

So, four or five years ago, we decided to relocate our water feature. As we have two acres of meadow-ish field, there were plenty of options. We settled on a partly shaded corner that was already backed by a long mound, the basis of which was the spoil from the old pond. We took some professional advice from a pond specialist, Mark. And we hauled in our builder, the late Micky the Brickie, to dig a hole.

I had read that water doesn’t freeze if it’s at least eight feet deep so we decided to go down eight feet. Using a succession of increasingly hefty JCBs, Micky went at it with a will, clearly having a whale of a time. The spoil started to form a croissant-shaped mound protecting the pond. When he got to eight feet, we all decided he should push on. At twelve feet, Micky reached the bedrock. It was now a mighty excavation, some fifty feet long, thirty feet across at its widest point (it was pear-shaped) and deep enough for me to stand on David’s head and know that I’d barely break the surface (we didn’t actually test this notion). Fargo the Great Dane gazed mournfully into the hole, picturing all the bones he could bury there. But he and Tati, his fellow dog, and the rest of us could walk down from the staggered shallow end and stand in the pit and marvel at its dimensions. It was going to be a serious pond.

Mark the pond advisor secured us the appropriate size of liner and he and his assistant spent the best part of a day draping it so that no unnecessary folds would create pockets of problem. We ordered ten tons of rocks from a local quarry and enjoyed the relish with which the truck-driver lowered them around the pond with his crane. The protective bank was very barren but we knew the bare look wouldn’t last long.

The next thing to do was to turn a hose into the hole. The water ran at full power without cease, 24 hours each day, and it took a week to fill. Fargo thought we’d taken leave of our senses. We knew we needed to let the water mature so we left it for a year, October to October. During the winter, we learned that water freezes even when it’s twelve feet deep. In the spring, I ferried countless netloads of tadpoles from the old pond to the new – there must easily have been a thousand. I figured there would be enough microscopic life for them all to feed on by then. An undisturbed body of water out in the open develops a vast culture within a very short span. Certainly there was already evidence of countless newts well dug in.

In the second October, we transferred the fish. Mark and his mate came over to catch them all for us and identify each one by type. The last golden orfe had died so there was just the blue left of the original shoal. We decided to call him Orpheus. He was the first of the fish that I put into the new pond with my own hands so I felt a special bond. All told, there were almost a hundred. And jeepers, they were excited by their new home. All that first evening, they swam round and round in a single shoal close to the surface, a fabulous sight. We were so entranced by them that we neglected to take a picture.

The gorgeous kingfisher

In the morning, it was quite different. They had swum down, found the bottom, rootled in the accumulated sludge on the pond floor and clouded the water. They no longer swam together but explored confidently and alone, luxuriating in the colossal amount of space. The water was now the colour of the mint tea you get served in the countries of north Africa and it has remained so ever since.

Before we introduced the fish, we had installed a pump, lowered to the bottom and used to keep a certain amount of circulation constant in the water. It returned as a water course, tumbling over rocks into the shallow end. In its path we planted watercress to help cleanse the water. But, as before, there was no filtration. Only hardy fish would survive our conditions: no koi, only the stalwart ghost variety.

We introduced a few other fish, including some sterlets and a couple of tench to graze the lower water (we never see them but we know they’re there) and a few more eye-catching comets. The pond has been a great success and little trouble. The number of residents has grown hugely with successive generations of fry and plenty of space in which to hide and survive. There have been very few casualties that we know of – no visible deaths for at least two seasons – though most springs have been marked by many frog bodies in the pond. These appear to be the result of over-active fornication on the part of the frogs rather than any systemic issue in the pond. This year, unexpectedly, there were barely any such calamities but David has still noticed dozens of tiny froglets in the grass while working around the pond.

But predators are still a problem. We have seen rats in the pond and there are plenty of places for rats to hide and even live among the woodpiles and other havens we have provided. I don’t know whether rats take fish. Two summers ago, I happened upon a fish lying on the bank. It was quite a substantial specimen – a mirror carp, I think. I assumed it was dead – its head was bloodied – but then it twitched a bit. I hurried off to get a bucket so that I could scoop up some pond water and transfer it to a place of safety. The first bucket I found turned out to be holed. With a better pail, I ran back to the pond. The fish had gone. Then I found it a foot or two away in the grass. I lifted it carefully into the bucket. Needless to say, it died during the night.

A majestic heron in flight

I felt sure that the mirror carp was too weak to have flapped itself so far. A heron would never have returned so soon if it had been disturbed. I figured that the predator must have been a rat. They are strong hunters, especially if hungry. But would a rat dive into the water, fasten onto the head of a fish as large as itself and haul it onto the bank? I have consulted the internet where, as on any other topic, there are as many opinions as there are commentators. But the balance of finding is that rats only take small fish, if at all. The great danger of rats is that they introduce Weil’s Disease into the water, harmless to fish but potentially deadly to humans if the bacterium enters through a cut on the skin. Fifty people die of this in Britain every year.

We have seen a kingfisher at the pond. He sits on one of the rocks and bides his time. He’s a rare sighting because such an alert bird is aware of you before you are of him unless he’s very preoccupied. And he’s a truly beautiful sighting, as exquisite and exotic as any species you might see in Asia, Africa or the Caribbean. If he makes off with the odd small fish – ones without names – we can’t begrudge him.

But what of Ron? Well, generations of herons, young as well as full-grown, have visited the pond. David grows a lot of bamboo and the canes he discards are handy for creating barriers at the water’s edge that ought to baffle and deter the heron, either from trying to land or from trying to walk into the water. We aim to surprise them so that we can see where they were standing and increase the defences accordingly. And the pond is little help to Ron’s cause. The shallow end is limited and slopes away abruptly and fast. There are few vantage points at the water’s edge and all of those are barricaded. There are few large plants established in the water and certainly none that could bear a big bird’s weight. The rocks must be too high for the heron to spear fish from without overbalancing.

A common carp. Big Bill was not as big as this

For the first few years of the pond, I felt sure we had made it Ron-proof. There was no evidence of fish loss. All the named specimen were present and correct. There was never physical evidence of any kind of struggle. We decided that Ron would satisfy himself with finding frogs in the grass.

But I fear I have been complacent. For weeks and indeed now for months, I have seen neither Big Bill Broonzy nor Orpheus. Nor have I spotted a single shubunkin – we must have had eight or ten when the pond was still new. Chubby Checker is still reporting at feed times and the ghost koi, aggressive and splashy feeders, seem all to be present and correct. I had thought both Big Bill and the orfe were pretty safe, although each had his vulnerable behaviour pattern. Orpheus was comparatively conspicuous, being so white (blue-white) and for the first year or two he seemed happiest in the shallows. But while he was often the first up for food, he was always very fast, both in reaction and in flight. But a heron evidently does strike with lightning speed. And it is prepared to wait patiently for hours, standing absolutely rigid, its eye fixed on the water. Orpheus has been apparently absent for long periods before – weeks, even – but I hardly think he can be expected to resurface now, after what may well be three or four months. I am sad. He had lived here longer than have we. He must have been at least fifteen years old.

A heron can handle a damned big fish

Big Bill the carp was a substantial specimen, a good eighteen inches long and heavy-set. He had quite a lot of orange coloration on his back and a swirl of blue behind his head, like a striking birthmark. Maybe we should have dubbed him Gorbachev. His vulnerable habit was to cruise lazily just below the surface and close to the edges of the pond. That would make him of great interest of Ron, I can see, but I always assumed he would be too much of a challenge. However, looking at Google Images, I came across a photograph of a heron brandishing a full-grown rabbit by the ears (too distressing to post here). I fear I have badly underestimated Ron.

We shall go on monitoring Ron’s visits and bolstering the barricades. I read that the favourite hunting time for herons is first light. He would be undisturbed at our pond for a good long time then. I also read that they are highly intuitive and resourceful birds, adept at learning how to bypass hazards. I think we can only be sure that we have outfoxed him when a whole hunting season has passed without a sighting of him.

Meanwhile, our pond is a glorious haven. There is nothing more restorative than to sit in one of our Adirondack chairs with a glass of chilled white wine or a vodka tonic and a stimulating book or a sparkling conversation while the sun sinks over the willows and the insects start to stir, ready for the bats to fly in at dusk. The encircling mound, full of grasses and wildflowers, shields the view of us from the lane and deadens any traffic sound from the distant main road. All we hear is the gurgle of the watercourse, the occasional splash of a fish and the extensive and complex dialogue of the many birds that frequent our field.

At the centre of it is the mystery – dare I say, the miracle – of our wondrous pond.