Dressing Up Your Pond with Native Habitat

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Dressing Up Your Pond with Native Habitat

By Kent Boucher

The northern corners crown our state with their excellent natural fisheries that are unparalleled throughout the vast majority of the rest of the state. In the Northeastern counties we have pristine, cold water trout streams and in the Northwestern counties we have our few and only naturally formed lakes. For the rest of the state all of our fishing takes place in the river systems and man-made reservoirs such as farm ponds. If you’re fortunate enough to own a farm pond, then you know how valuable of a resource it is to have on your property for both hunting and fishing. Despite understanding this reality many farm ponds fail to reach their full potential within the larger network of habitat on the property, and one simple way to improve upon this missed opportunity is to manage what’s outside of the banks.

Water Quality Determines Fishing Quality
On my family’s farm there are several farm ponds. Some of them never amounted to anything more than bovine jacuzzies, but others were loaded with bass and bluegills and provided some of the best fishing opportunities that I have ever experienced. Ashamedly, we did nothing to care for the ponds. We just hoped that our little honey hole for great bass fishing would remain just that, all on its own. But things changed, and that great bass fishing is now only known by old photos in my camera roll. There literally is not one single bass left in those ponds, and the destruction of those fisheries was preventable. If we are ever going to get them re-established, we will need to adopt several practices in order to establish and maintain healthy water quality.

The first thing we will need to do is fence off the ponds from intrusive cows that destabilize and erode banks, and add pond killing overloads of nitrates and phosphates to the water every time nature calls. Barbed wire fencing should be plenty, and will allow deer to access the ponds if needed. But cows using the ponds for toilets is far from the only means for over nutrifying the water so just keeping cows out of the ponds won’t be enough to improve the water quality. Runoff containing fertilizers and pesticides harm the water quality as well. The influx of nitrates and phosphates caused oxygen hogging algal blooms which killed nearly all of the fish. The other thing carried along with runoff is soil. The filling in of soil in our ponds over the years most likely caused the ponds to become shallow enough to freeze through much of the water in the ponds during a very cold stretch during the 2019 winter, killing off any fish that weren’t killed by the eutrophication from the algal blooms in the Summer. If you do find your pond in a state of nutrient overload, you can consult a local expert, Bjornsen Pond Management. They have options for preventative, mechanical, biological, and chemical control to help your pond. They’ve been helping customers repair and improve ponds all over Iowa and beyond.

Totally eliminating soil, nutrient, and chemical runoff isn’t possible, but mitigating a great amount of it is. The best way to slow the amount of runoff around our ponds and filter off a lot of the soil and agrichemical load is by planting native grasses and flowers along the banks of the pond. A tallgrass pollinator seed mix suited for wet soils would be perfect for this. The high stem counts of a diverse prairie planting will slow the surface runoff allowing it to be absorbed into the soil, and the plants will take up much of the surplus nutrients and hold back some of the chemical contaminants that harm invertebrate food sources for the fish. The wider the strip of prairie, the more filtering for the pond, the better the water quality, the healthier the population of fish.

Flowers For Birds and Fish
When the words vegetation and fishing are used in the same sentence the intention is almost always to discuss plant life in the water, and is usually in reference to better fish habitat, notorious snags or maybe even invasive aquatic plants. But continuing with the theme of the article thus far, I am going to explain how the plants growing outside of the pond affect the fishing going on inside of it, and the hunting around it.

As I just discussed, native flower and grass filter strips around a pond can protect it from damaging runoff, but these plantings provide other benefits as well, specifically the flowering species, or forbs as habitat managers will call them. Insects are a common food source shared between fish and game birds such as waterfowl, doves, pheasants, quail, and turkeys, and insects are found where there is an abundance of flowering plants. Insects are protein packed food sources for all of their predators making them especially important for game bird species during nesting season. Forbs also produce another high-quality food source for birds in the form of seeds. Planting native legume species such as round-headed bush clover, showy and Illinois tick-trefoil, prairie mimosa, purple prairie clover, and partridge pea will provide another food source that runs high in protein for game birds as well, and will hold steady through winter unlike insects. Each year when Labor Day weekend dawns the start to the fall hunting seasons many forbs will have gone to seed, and hunting near a pond surrounded by a substantial stand prairie loaded with forbs will make for a prime dove hunting hot spot.

Manicure for Function and Diversity
As a grassland conservationist one of the many land use changes, I wish I could achieve with the wave of a magic wand is the abolishment of the majority of mowing. If ditches, waterways, buffer strips, and yards were left unmowed most years, we would see a major population rebound for many ground nesting birds, insects, and pollinators that would make everyone happier and healthier. But I don’t have a magic wand, and I don’t think rural America intends to give up our favorite pastime anytime soon. Kidding aside, some mowing is needed for controlling invasive weed species, and for functional use purposes such as fire breaks, and access pathways. Both of those needs apply to the functionality of a farm pond. Mowing or trimming a couple of passes along a pond bank makes the fishing much more accessible for shore fishermen, and safer for pheasant hunters pushing a patch of prairie around the pond in late fall. During the first year of establishing the stand of prairie 2-3 mowings will be needed to ensure the best diversity of grass and forb species can be achieved. By year three spot mowing invasive weeds should be the only additional need for firing up the mower.

Someday soon, my family will restore our ponds on our farm, and when we do, we will focus on the needs outside of the ponds just as much as the needs inside of them. Of course, deciding on the best approach to meeting these needs will require some research and a good seed supplier. I will consult the website www.grownative.org to learn what species of native plants would work well around our ponds, and we will order all of our seeds from Iowa based Hoksey Native Seeds. Getting the most out of the ground we own is not a short-term venture. We will be playing the long game, excavating, burning, spraying, (some) mowing, planting, and weeding will all be on the chore list for years to come. But in the end the hard work and sweat will pay off for generations to come.

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