Creating a wildlife pond

Deze teks is alleen beschikbaar in het Engels.

Hi readers, I’m Santiago, an 18 year old student from United World College Maastricht and I’ve been working with the team at De Groene Poort Oost to design a wildlife pond that will serve as a habitat for local wildlife, a learning space for kids and a way to promote awareness of Biodiversity in our community. I study a course in Business & Sustainability at the college so it’s great that this project helps me put my learning about Nature conservation into practice!

The wildlife pond has been designed to have a mix of different depths and importantly, shallow areas, where frogs can spawn, birds can drink and bathe, and hedgehogs can drink safely. We’re also thinking of having a mix of floating and underwater plants as well as some marginals around the pond, as well as seeing what nature brings itself. After all, the more plants we have the healthier and cleaner the pond will be 🙂.

But for the project to come to life, I’ll need your help!

The plan is to dig our pond in a 5x3m area and its deepest point will be 1.5m. We already have a layout and some digging has begun and we hope to do more of the excavation on 22nd February during your regular klusdag if you would like to help us. Once prepared we are planning to lay the lining on the 14th March when we have our school NL Doet Day. Here we would really value some help with materials and expertise. In particular we are looking for large and small boulders to create the edges and even smooth round pebbles if you have them. Also if anyone has some good decking and support timber we can use to create a small viewing platform, that would save us some money and be a good recycling of unwanted resources also!

Hope to meet more of you soon and thanks to you all for this great opportunity for me to put my learning into practice and help create something wonderful for all of us and our local wildlife!