Yeah I know I need to address the trees. I've started cleaning up the smaller brush, < 12" wide but those big boys are too much for me so I'll have to let someone else handle them.
I talked to NRCS over the phone and they said for 0.2 acres I only need like 2 acres of watershed so I think I've got that. I don't think that trail would block run off, but I'm not really sure what counts as watershed. I assume just land thats sloping down into the pond right? Or if there is heavy underbrush on the sloped land does that suck up all the potential water?
My pond is the overflow from neighbor 1's 3/4 acre pond, connected by a buried 12" pipe when water is high. My gutters also go into the pond and the runoff from my neighbors 2's property flows into my pond from the other side.
Seems like the online version of google earth doesn't do history, I'll install the pro version and take a look. But it has always lost at least 3+ feet of water over the year for the past 5 years I've been here.
The deeper part that still has water has about 1.5-2 feet left in it. I just hammered a marked pipe in so I can measure how much the water goes down per day/week.
