Herons: shoot them, shoot the statuesque, marriage-wrecking little bleeders

[Threadworm]

I knew that herons took fish from ornamental ponds but when we reurned from a morning out and saw that 20 fish were gone and one big fat fish was stranded next to the pond, I thought that was too much for a heron to manage right next to a busyish street.

So I called the police and reported fish thieves, then phoned my fish-loving DH at work.

Huge row followed -- him thinking that we should lock the gates at all time to keep out thieving yobs and me thinking that we should risk the odd theft rather than be so anti-social.

I hang up, start to doubt that thieving yobs would operate in broad daylight and only nick small cheap fish rather than large expensive ones. I do a little online research and discover that our little crime scene bears all the hallmarks of heron attack. They are especially likely to skewer big fish and then fail to cram them down their greedy throats, so leaving them at side of pond.

Marriage saved.

(Don't really want to shoot them, with their cute pterodactyl lurchings across the sky. But still, bastards, eh?)

fishie, it will be a cute widdle wabbit. Or a slug. More animals to splat. Oh goodie.

now I'd happily shoot the bloody "wabbits" in my garden

and the moles

and the pheasants

Our friend has a huge carp pond, he uses clear fishing wire from the corner of his pond to a tree branch
we didn't do this for our pond and of our 24 fish the F&*ing bird ate 16 at one breakfast and came back the next day and too 6 more.
We now have this wire system but also younger smaller fish

Green parakeets.

We dug a pond for our pet goldfish and he was eaten by a heron

do you all live in bleeding Chatsworth then? Or Tatton? Or Kenilworth?

FGS. What's wrong with a few slugs and butterflies like us proles? You've all got farking bears and gnus.

Actually not green parakeets eating your tomato seedlings, fishie, more likely to be pigeons if it's birds. I meant Green parakeets up against the wall when the revolution comes.

You should make friends with the local wood pigeons. If properly trained they will attack the heron in twos and scare them off. Thats what happens at ours. OUR pond is over a meter deep though, so the fish has also learnt to dive deep down. You have to learn to train nature to do as you want, my dear!

Ours was deep (we read the manuals!), and we had a piece of pipe in the bottom for the goldfish to hide in. However, we didn't train the pigeons.

lol's at bears and gnu's. GNU's!

We did have both badgers and hedgehogs, till I managed to put the garden in order. Our garden was a blooming jungle at night, we needed hard hats and a stick to fend off all the wildlife! And we kept a pet fox living under the floor of the shed (his choice), and a frog inside the other shed.

Do you still have hedgehogs Quintessential? Cos we've got just about everything, but I've never seen a hedgehog here....
I've even made a hedgehog house, that mice now live in

I had been cutting down lots of overgrown shrubs and bushes that summer, and left it on a huge nearly 2 meter tall pile in the middle of the lawn. Automn came, winter came, and I decided to leave it till spring when it would be easier to cut to small pieces and bin.... (Big garden, was out of view anyway). By February a family of hedghogs made the pile its home. They like things like that. They moved on in summer when the pile disappeared.

My dad has a'squirrel trap' and I have often wondered as to it's legality - is it?

Apparently they 'get trapped' and then dropped in the pond. How proud I am.

Also on the wildlife front - there is something that sounds like an owl in our garden, but it actually just sounds like someone taking the piss and doing an impression of an owl. Surely that is not possible every night - so does a real owl sound like a fake? Toooowwitt-too -wooooo !!

yes the trick with herons is to make sure they can't land anywhere they can fish from. If they can't see a likely spot to land on they won't even try.

I love the owl that takes the piss by saying Too Wit Too Woo. There is a bird in our garden that I swear just says 'Tweet' over and over again as an ironic comment on our attempts to spell birdsong.

I also like the suggestion of training Traitor Elements of nature to attack the bits we don't like. I suppose that is what dogs are for, so I will give mine a crash course in staking out herons.

Can I just add frogs and toads to the deathlist for jumping out and frightening me whenever I step into the garden. And for hiding in my wellies.

I keep imagining Heron's tripping over the wire and mothing "frac it"..... I have quite a sad imagination.

Do big dogs work?
So.... if they're flying overhead (Heron's not dogs) and they spot a big dog, do they land?

The murdering fecking bastard has just come back. All the small fish are scoffed so s/he just picked out the poor fat fish again and left him on the side to die because too big to swallow.

It's war now.

Agree WAR is upon us..........magpies where back with a fecking vengance this morning as where the crows

I hsve put DS2's plush toy leopard by the pond as a temorary measure.

oooh watch out herons, threadworm is gonna set wninnie the pooh on ya next...