[Sangreaal]

Quote: Originally Posted by Richard Rombold Marie, When your brain has rested please consider how you are going to deal with birds. The herons and egrets will take a few, but you have to be prepared for the cormorants and mergansers. They hit those ponds and it's lights out. King Fisher's also will work the ponds constantly. If you loose 20 fish a day (very conservative) then that adds up to 7,300 fish a year. If those are culled fish that's a good wallop. You can loose that number overnight if a flock lands. Oh yeah, American Pelicans as well. They are a treat to watch. They land as a flock and start at the edges of the pond and heard everything into a tight ball in the center. Once there they gorge themselves. It's the opposite for most diving birds. They work from the center out where the Herons and Egrets are waiting along the shore. Also, brood stock can be taken by Osprey and Bald Eagles. I don't want to scare you, but plan for it.

Thanks for the head's up, Richard. I haven't yet forgotten about losing my favorite koi ever to a heron, and we have every one of the feathered predators you've mentioned, right down to the pelicans.

I don't want to scare anybody, but I'm probably going to utilize hotwire against the wading birds. One touch of that and they'll think they just met God and he wasn't very happy. As far as the diving birds, it'll probably be monofilament line criss-crossing over each pond in a harlequin design small enough to (hopefully) ferhoodle the most diminutive of divers. And hopefully it won't be aesthetically unpleasing. Maybe I'll grow a network of vines suspended as cover...there's no telling what I'll come up with between now and then.

Besides green lasers, what else in your experience have you used on your ponds to deter predator attacks? What worked and what failed miserably?

Marie