Well we had decided that if the weather was nice that we would get into the garden and begin to clear the pond out. This was a hard decision to make, not because of our fear of disturbing the wildlife but that it was cold. In fact we had to break the surface ice from the pond before we started and this was 50mm thick.
We decided to start to clear the pond so early in the year in the hope that we would get it 'finished' before the frogs decided to mate and we would also cause as little disturbance as we could.
So this is how it looked after we had removed the ice and water.
I did help, honestly, but someone had to take the pictures
Most of the vegetation has gone, all that was left was smelly, messy gungy stuff.
This was the last picture taken on this day although we had managed to clear the pond completely. By this time though it was too dark to take pictures.
I hasten to add we slept well that night and we smelt quite a bit too.
During the clearing operation we probably found and relocated to our log pile abot 15 frogs and 20 newts. The newts were quite interesting as the information we had aquired from books that we have read said that they are an animal that only uses the water to breed, and this doesn't normally happen until March or April. So what were they doing in our pond?