Digging a Duck Pond

For the past year and a half, my friends and I have wanted to dig a pond. We don’t just want to dig a normal pond in someone’s front yard though; we want to dig a duck hunting pond. We have been dreaming about having our own place to hunt ducks on. This dream almost came true last weekend and may happen this coming weekend.

I live in a rural area just north of Columbus. Around my house I am surrounded by fields. There are two big fields right behind my house that lead all the way back to a woods. Those fields and the woods are owned by my Grandma. This is perfect for us because it means we have a place to dig our pond. All the way back where the field meets the woods is a very wet area, we want to dig our pond right there.

This area is mostly in the field but it extends into the woods some. This makes it perfect for a duck pond. We want to dig the pond into the field some and there is a small problem with that. We don’t want to dig up any of the field and remove area that could have been farmed. Our plan is to just dig where the field floods so much that it doesn’t get planted anyway and in the woods.

There were two keys to digging the pond the first was getting permission to dig the pond on my grandmas property and the second was getting permission to use my aunt and uncles bulldozer. About 8 months ago I was sitting in my Grandmas kitchen just talking to her and I managed to change the topic to digging a pond. She didn’t seem like she wanted a pond but she didn’t care. She said as long as my dad was ok with it then she wouldn’t care. My dad is the oldest child in the family and he makes most of the decisions for the family. My dad was ok with the idea, maybe even a little excited about the idea. The next part was getting the bulldozer. I had been trying to get my dad to ask for us to use it since my aunt and uncle really like him but my dad never got around to it. About two weeks ago I asked my cousin, Brad. He is in charge of my aunt and uncles farm, he didn’t care but he said I have to ask his parents since they are the ones that own it. I told my dad that we had Brad’s approval, and the next day he asked my aunt and uncle and they didn’t care. So now we have a bulldozer and a place to dig.

Since we had everything we needed we decided to dig the pond last weekend. The only problem is that in order to dig it has to be dry. The area we are going to dig gets very wet and holds lots of water. This will make it very hard to find a time to dig. Last week it was dry all week so we thought we were going to get to dig but then it started pouring down all of Friday and this completely ruined our plans. Our plans now are to dig whenever we get a dry weekend. Hopefully it’s soon though because duck season will be over in a couple months and we would like to dig it before the season ends.