Welcome to the forum Corgi and thanks for the awesome pictures and sharing your story. It is also so good to hear that there are other fellow MI pond owners and lovers.

I'm in the suburb of GR, MI and am envious of your rural setting and beautiful pond. I love your pictures and hearing about your struggles and successes.

I'm curious. Is the pond a natural ground water pond? DO you know who built it or if they had a good compacted clay liner? Does the water level fluctuate and how do you deal with that? Can you add water at will?

I would second the concern about 24/7 aeration and there are a lot of good articles about that topic here and you can ask questions if you would like.

What failed on your aeration pumps and how was it fixed? I'm told I have to fix my pumps after only a few years of low hour use so it sounds like some repairs are inevitable on these machines.

My brother in law has a nice small pond and for a few years he had issues with cloudy, muddy water, winter kill, stagnant water issues, algae etc despite a surface fountain. I tried to encourage him to read about bottom aeration and try it and finally last year he did. The smell was awful at startup but now he has very clear healthy water and no winter kill.

So you have HBG and YP, with LMB as your predator? What forage species do you have? Crayfish? shiners? I'm wondering how you keep your YP fed maybe you pellet feed?

I'd prefer to have a lot less deer around only because by us they are 'city dwelling' deer and become nuisance in a hurry.

I love your owl pictures. We have a resident barred owl pair in the middle of a fairly suburban area. I'm convinced they stay put because there is so much food in the pond for them. They gorge on American toads in the spring when the toads come to swim in the pond and lay eggs. They clean up fish and frogs in the summer, and we love to hear them. We rarely see them though.

Hope you continue to share your stories with us. For you and other MI pond owners who might be reading this, I may be asking to share a larger (minimum size order) package of stocker walleye or SMB (haven't decided yet) this spring or summer.