Change the water?

Yesterday morning I found a dead bird in my pond!
The pond is rather small (one of the pre-formed things) - I wonder how the bird managed to drown in THAT! Anyway, it might have been in there for as much as 24 hours, and there was a build up of loads of algae (not typical, the pond usually has hardly any). I removed the bird and the algae (obviously!), the fish (3 goldfish in there, pond a couple of years old) are looking ok so far.
Is this now contaminated and do I need to drain the pond and re-fill?
Must add that by the end of this week the fish will be getting a new home anyway (new raised pond in another corner of the garden), will they be ok until then?

 

Oh dear ,sorry to hear about your dead bird :( perhaps it was a young fledgling that got into difficulty. You don't need to change the water, your Goldfish will be fine.I am no expert on Algae, but its been the perfect weather for Algae to flourish..perhaps just a coincidence that it occured at the same time as the dead bird. I am sure that you probably know this...Don't put the fish into the new raised pond if it has been filled with tap water, you can buy stuff to de-chlorinate the water, but it is much better to leave the pond to stand for a week and let the Chlorine disperse. Make sure that you add some of the water from your old pond to your new raised pond, this will add all the beneficial bugs and won't be such a shock for your fish. Good luck and I hope the fish are very happy in their new home :D

 

Poppy33 is right there is not need to drain the pond.Birds bathe in ponds and their droppings land in it all the time. They do contain parasites which can of course cause problems for the fish as ulcers etc are an easy target for the parasites to infect. This is 1 reason people are recomended to go for either a fish pond or a wildlife pond. With a wildlife pond you build it to allow for birds bathing but if properly designed then in a fish pond you can prevent or limit the opportunities for bathing. The droppings or a dead bird you can't do anything about other than keep your fish healthy, use a UV light and treat early for signs of parasites.

 

Thanks for your advice - I just thought that early stages of decomposing bird might be a problem! But then, when I removed the poor thing it was still in pretty good shape (better anyway than those the cats tend to get a hold of - we have a "wall" of tall conifers in our garden where lots of birds live, and we have 4 cats, the cats only go out occasionally - only when we go out and let them come along - so there's not that much damage on the birds but every once in a while they do get one, and the poor birds look somewhat worse for wear than the one that ended his life in the pond!)
Anyway, when we get the new pond we are planning to use quite a few bucketfulls of water from the old ones (we have one with fish and one without right now) as well as the nicely established plants from these two, so to help the new pond establish faster so the fish can have their new home sooner. They outgrew the old one a bit now - they tripled in size from when we got them.

But thanks for putting my mind to rest regarding the drowned bird...