Garden Pond Wildlife: Photos, Video & ID's

shirlsgw

Hi everyone,

Having a new wildlife pond, a thread for sharing images of garden pond wildlife could be a great help with ID's. I'm not aware if a thread like this exists already.

I am certain there are members here who have kept garden ponds for many years, who know who to expect and when, as well as the pond newbies like myself who would love to discover the ID's of what is moving about in the water of our new ponds.

Crawling out of lifted blanket weed, placed on a rock on the edge of my pond, the two creatures below were seen. I'm thinking the creature on the right is some kind water boatman? I have searched considerably on the other one but am stumped completely by it - can anyone help? Sorry, image taken was a shaky phone one.

 

 

My interest in encouraging wildlife to my garden began with writing a gardenwatch blog. A surprising 36 bird species have been spotted in the garden since 2006 and these first few Blackbirds. I might take a confident guess that my new wildlife pond is going to exceed that number quite considerably.

Victoria Sponge

I think they are both backswimmers, shirlsgw

I had the one on the right confimed recently on here. It had been in my pond but then I also saw it flying.

I think the green one is too- I found a similar image on google.

The proper name is Notonecta if that helps. 

Lily Pilly

 Great idea to open a thread like this We have been puzzled by this little prehistoric looking thing found ( hundreds of them) as we dug out an old pond. Anyone know what it is. It has a really hard back and reared up at us  dinosaur  style!!  His head is to the left. Really appreciate opinions, thanks.

Dovefromabove

Looks like a dragonfly larvae to me - have a look here 

http://www.parkcitizenscience.org/dragonfly/ nd see what you think.

 

There's lots of threads and photos on here about wildlife ponds and their residents - put wildlife pond into the search bar at the top and see what you get.  

Also try putting grass snakes into the search bar 

Lily Pilly

Thanks a lot. The link is a great one. The way it's raining here today ponds will be overflowing soon. 

shirlsgw

Thanks for the ID suggestion, Victoria 

I did wonder if they could be backswimmers. I also considered the one on the left could just be at a different stage of growth (younger than the other) but its shape seemed so different.

Thanks for adding your image, Lily 

That’s exactly the sort of real images I hoped members might add. That will help all pond newbies to spot dragonfly larvae among mud or blanket weed lifted from our ponds – brilliant!

shirlsgw

Pond skaters were the first to be spotted moving in to my garden pond (well on top really) and soon after water beetles arrived bobbing briefly on the surface before scurrying around the bottom - great fun to watch

Video below captured back in April showing Pond skater doing a bit of sunbathing as the water beetle runs along under it. (Please note some background music has been added to this capture).

Tried adding video directly but it doesn't appear to be working for the moment so meantime here is the direct link to video on youtube: http://youtu.be/ZZudMGBu6vM and a video screen grab cropped...

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

 Video should be showing above.

shirlsgw

Mosquito larvae spinning around the surface of my smaller rock pool pond gave neck shivers to watch back in July 2011. If you've got movement in still water this could be it. At this time my pond pump wasn't running.

Video footage can be viewed at http://youtu.be/9w7lPgYEcCA until I can work out how to embed it here. Meantime, here's a cropped video screen grab...