| FISH, WILDLIFE AND POND ANIMALS |
| We put tilapia in our pond in 2009 to eat the duckweed. Here's Sarah with a nice string of them. We've also stocked the pond with catfish and bream. |
| The pond snakes like tilapia, too! We have both poisonous and non-poisonous water snakes.... and, yes, we often go on evening "snake hunts" to thin the snaky population. We don't stock the pond to feed snakes! |
| Tilapia are good because even though they're a non-native species, they cannot survive a winter in our area, so they cannot threaten native fish. They eat the duckweed, reproduce like rabbits, and grow into a nice sized fish. |
| It's not uncommon to find a mother turtle digging a nest for her eggs. They eat the fish, too, but I don't have the same animosity for them that I have for the snakes. |
| One of the more unusual animals from the pond: a leech. (That Sarah had to keep for a few days in an aquarium.) |
| We're so blessed to live on a farm surrounded by nature....until I find a baby snake that the cats have brought into the house! On the positive, everyday for Sarah is a science lesson of some kind. |
| This 5 lb. catfish appeared to have been bitten by a snake, so we caught it to photograph. (2014) |