The fish seem to have handled the move just fine: they’re all moving around at their ease, as usual, except when someone comes over to the pond, at which time they hide behind one of the underwater flowerpots (and this they routinely did in the other pond, too). This pond does have a much larger surface area than their old one, though, and I’m now beginning to wonder about how to protect them, in the new pond, from the herons that routinely fish in the big natural pond out back. Our friend Charles up north has told us too many horror stories about how the local heron (known in Northern dialect as “the hern-cran”) has cleaned out his pond time and again. I think probably nylon screening over the top should do the trick, when we’re away from home.
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…Of course, we have something Charles doesn’t have: three cats. The senior two would probably consider a heron to be a novel kind of Meals On Wheels, considering how often they’ve brought in various live / dead waterfowl from the pond to eat in the kitchen. (This brings up too many hysterical memories of how Mr. Squeak once brought in a live and very pissed-off baby duckling while we were in the middle of a conference call with a German production company about a miniseries we were preparing to do with them. Peter had to dump the phone and relieve Squeak of the duckling, run some water into the sink of the bathroom under the stairs, fire the duckling into it, shut the door and get back on the phone, while Squeak ran around shouting in [loosely translated] cat, “Gimme back my toy!” After the conference call Squeak was distracted with canned tuna while Peter repatriated the duckling. The vicissitudes of life in the country…)
