There are 30,000 facets in a dragonfly eye. A dragonfly sitting on a blade of grass and facing the middle of the pond is watching for intruders to his domain. If the intruder should be a female dragonfly, they’ll chase around until he catches her or she allows him to. Then, they literally hook up.

Our pond projects really began in 1987 when we got dogs, two big ones to keep an eye on things. When we first moved to midtown, there were some harrassing, prank phone calls while I was working evenings. A new, unlisted phone number stopped that, and the big dogs were an insurance policy against a frustrated bad guy who might try anything to breath heavily into my wife’s ear. The dogs needed water, and lots of it. When the weather cleared that spring we dug a hole in the backyard and set a 450 gallon stock tank into it. The dogs could drink; birds could drink. An ornamental tree and some flowers dressed up the project and it was good. Later some gifted goldfish livened things up but required filtration and a pump. That is when the dragonflies arrived.

Dragonflies mate in the air for several minutes at a time, the female arching her back under the male and attaching to him to accept his cache, or they can mate on a branch of vegetation for longer, as long as ten minutes. Considering most only live a few weeks as dragonflies, that is a fair percentage of their above-water life spent copulating. They are waterborn and water-matured, up to six years before emerging to the air, drying their new wings and taking flight. Then sex. Now wouldn’t that be something, to go from the boggy depths to the azure heights, then sex, all in a few weeks time. No wonder they spend such a percentage of it locked in conubial bliss. What might that dragonfly male be communicating to his beloved during that ten minutes, and she to him, and how might they be doing it? We saw a pair of dragons mating one afternoon over the pond, and when they fell too low, the resident bullfrog rolled out his tongue like a welcome mat and got the lower one, the female. The male buzzed off, a frustrated victim of a particularly gruesome case of coitus interuptus.

The rest of the dragonfly’s time on earth is spent eating flies and mosquitos, fighting each other, or laying eggs.

The stock tank went into the ground in 1988. In 2003, the backyard pond project expanded to 1300 gallons. The oldest daughter was graduating from high school and wanted a party in the back yard. An expanded water feature (dug out to 30 ft by 16 ft with the 3 foot hole in the middle where the stock tank is) added visual interest to the backyard party area. The benefits have been rewarding in unplanned ways. Increased filtration has made the water crystal clear and the fish have responded with lots of babies and are easy to see and enjoy. The dogs’ prefer the pond water as the water quality has improved, also. And the dragonfly visitors have increased.

The backyard pond expansion came in early June. Later that fall, the 1 acre pond was dug out at the farm.

A country neighbor was having a pond cleaned out and enlarged. In order to do that, it would have to be drained and the water would run over my land. The pond digger contacted me and asked if I was interested in digging a pond, that because the equipment was already there, he could be in and out quickly and the runoff from the neighbor’s project would help to fill mine. The timing seemed good and the price reasonable.

He started quickly. There were challenges immediately. The slough where he dug had once contained a little pond, and it always had a foot of standing water in it, even in the dog days of August. When the pond digger began escavating, he uncovered a spring at the south end, the shallow end fortunately, that ran strong and clear right into the hole the dozer was trying to dig out. They had to push up a temporary berm to hold back the water so they could scoop out the muck from the old pond, dig the core trench, then find clay to seal it with. There was also a vein of limestone that ran along the west side that was excavated out as much as possible and sealed with clay. It may be that vein that is leaking out under the dam.

When the pond was finished, estimated to be a surface acre and 14 feet deep, the pond digger returned to work on the neighbor’s, and a week later the water from that project flowed into the lower pond that had been steadily filling with spring water. What I didn’t consider was the fish that inhabited the neighbor’s pond. It was absolutely filled with gizzard shad, generations descended from the contents of a minnow bucket emptied years before, instant forage.

This spring was wetter than normal and the pond filled up early and has stayed full. A local fish farm stocked it with bluegills, hybrids, redears, fatheads, crayfish and channelcats. Next spring, the bass and a few walleye will go in. About a hundred fatheads and one channel cat rode back to the city in buckets and went into the backyard pond. I don’t get out to the country pond but a couple of times a year so having some of the country fish in the backyard allows me to monitor their progress and learn their habits.

There has been a fair bit of discussion about the disadvantages of allowing goldfish to get started in a pond. I dumped about thirty of them into the country pond. There are no predators yet, though some have said channels will hunt. I see little evidence of that in the backyard pond where there are an abundance of fatheads, now, and yoy goldfish. Mr. Cat goes for pellets and the other fish don’t seem bothered by him, despite how active he is and how much bigger he’s getting than everyone else. And, one wonders about the relationship between fatheads and goldfish, that they may be members of the same family of fish, and if so, shouldn’t goldfish fry be every bit as tasty and nutritious as fathead fry to any yoy bass or walleye? Maybe it depends on other factors, the general health of the pond, water clarity, the bloom, aeration and hiding places. Some of those factors will be addressed when projects are completed in later years. That’s part of the hobby aspect of this watergardening/pondmeistering. It is easy to get in a rush to do everything by tomorrow. But this man’s life doesn’t unfold that way. There aren’t enough hours in the day nor dollars in the bank to do the dock project, to buy aeration equipment, to have electricity run to the property, to install the stuff (only to have it vandalized or stolen because no one is there to watch over it), to build a cabin, to raise kids, to work for a living, and to have time to enjoy the flight of the dragons and their aerial pairings.

Things have happened despite my attentions and inattentions, however. Nature is filling in the gaps. There are choruses of frogs, tons of turtles, and Blue Dasher dragonflies and damselflies have found the country pond. The water is slowly clearing, the meadow mix took off robustly from the spring rains and the area doesn’t look like a wound any more. It’s green and lush, pretty. Ducks, turkey, deer and racoons are using it and it’s become a nice place to camp. The dogs love it. The two leaks at the back of the dam are still flowing, but it isn’t a heavy flow. And, as has been pointed out several times on this board, all ponds leak. And leaks do sometimes stop. It may be that some leaf litter from the surrounding trees will be a good thing in this regard. Owing to those regular rains, the pond has been full all summer.

When I first added the fatheads to the backyard pond, they disappeared under the waterlillies and it wasn’t clear whether they survived. It is now 4 months later and there are minnows everywhere, the hidden cove, the stream-beds, open water, under the waterfalls, fathead minnows are spreading to all corners of the pond, and there’s no telling how many fill the hole under the water lillies. But, they are little ones rather than the full-sized minnows that were stocked. Watching this process, it is obvious that now is not the time to stock predators. Better to wait until these babies are ready to have babies and the real, exponential population explosion begins. Also, the country pond doesn’t have any aquatic plants for the fatheads to spawn under or to hide around. All the more reason to put off stocking bass as long as possible, until next year when some flora has taken root and the fatheads are in high gear.

When it is time to stock the predators, one will go into the backyard pond to evaluate its habits and the effect it has on the resident population of goldfish and minnows. It will be interesting to watch how fast it grows, where it likes to hang out and how it behaves during different times of the month and year. Considering how many snails there are in the pond, it would have been interesting to have included a readear in the April addition with the minnows and catfish. If one is ever caught while fishing, it may find itself in a new home.

There has been a large (apprx. 3 inch), green dragonfly ovipositing around the lilly pads. She’ll work one area, inserting the tip of her tail over and again, then moving to other spots, over and again, before flying off. It seems a bit like posting to this website, leaving something and seeing what develops.