[elihu]

I haven't had a problem with it yet, but that's not to say I won't.

One suggestion (which I didn't follow) is to make sure the whole pond is at least a couple feet deep everywhere. Having shallow ledges just gives herons a convenient place to stand while they depopulate the pond of aquatic animals.

I wanted a place to set potted water plants though.

We did have an incident with a red-tail hawk. I was out chatting with one of the roommates by the pond when it lands nearby, and promptly catches and eats a snake.

The hawk was acting weird and not flying away, so we called up the Audubon society. They said if it looked injured we could try to catch it and bring it in to their office, so we donned welding gloves and every other available kind of PPE and chased it through the bushes and blackberry thickets of three properties before we finally caught it.

Fun fact: hawks are pretty docile when you cover their heads. We expected a fight and try to bite our fingers off but when we got a towel over it's head it pretty much just gave up and we stuffed it in a box and hauled it to Audubon. I'm not sure what happened to it after that; they probably kept it for a week or two and released it once its apparently injured wing was healed. It was an interesting day.