Body double keeps the herons away

Damien Enright on how to keep a pond-robber at bay.

THE other morning a personable woman phoned me from a local radio station telling me she was sure I was the right person to advise her listeners on how to keep herons away from their garden ponds. She was to phone me back for an interview but my phone was engaged until it was too late. Never mind. Here’s my halfpenny’s worth of wisdom on the subject.

Herons enjoy garden ponds and the fish in them, perhaps even more than their owners. Flying high overhead, they spot the golden opportunity and visit at dawn when there are no humans about to interrupt their breakfast. Standing on the pond edge, they select a koi here, a carp there. They will consume a fairground goldfish with the same relish as a dramatically patterned koi worth, perhaps, a thousand euro.

A possible way to keep the heron away is to stand a plastic heron alongside the pond. They are very territorial and will not invade another’s space. However, they are not stupid and if they see the same heron standing in the same spot in the same pose for days on end, they conclude the obvious. So perhaps the clever pond owner should, every few days, substitute a look-alike concrete cat or perhaps a dog. A menagerie of replicas brought out on a rota may be the answer. Enough to confuse any heron, and, indeed, perhaps the pond owners too.

Another answer is to make the pond shelve very sharply, so that the heron cannot wade. However, this may be a danger to children. A net over the pond will preserve the fish (and careless children) and if set a few inches below the surface may not even be noticeable.

Short sections of concrete pipes placed in the bottom of the pond (or plastic ones, if weed will grow on them) will give fish a hiding place and a retreat from the heron’s long beak. Water plants will also offer cover, but then the owner may not get to see the fish.

Recently, walking along the side of my local bay, I spotted a fine peregrine falcon sitting on the cabin of a boat moored far out in mid channel. I hauled out the binoculars to take a closer look. It was a peregrine in every aspect of form and feather, but for the fact that it was in exactly the same place, in exactly the same stance when I passed again 30 minutes later. When the euro finally dropped (one euro has the buying power of a penny when I first learned the phrase), I realised I was looking at a plastic peregrine and later, my birder friend Wolstenholme, told me it had been mounted on the classy motor cruisers to keep gulls from perching and defecating on same.

Gull droppings apparently leave nasty marks on high gloss, high-spec fibreglass, so who could blame the owners for scaring them off? And did it work? Yes, for a few days. Then the gulls arrived to mob the plastic peregrine and, finding it was artificial, treated it with the contempt it deserved by perching and defecating on its head. Again, I would advise the owners to provide dummy cats, dogs, white-tailed sea eagles and crocodiles to keep unwelcome birds away.

Some years ago, a Japanese friend gave our son a present of a wind-up toy dog which barked realistically. I’ve often wondered why worried home-owners, who have to secure a battery of locks and bolts on their front doors to keep burglars out, do not set up barking dogs that activate as soon as the door is touched, baying like rabid doberman pinschers. The burglars might suspect they were being scammed but how many would take the chance?

And now to a totally unrelated matter. I heard recently how the cool kids at Oxegen and other festivals now burn their dinky nylon tents rather than hike them home. When oil for nylon runs out, it may be back to sleeping on rubber ground sheets under flapping canvas. But they’ll have kids themselves by then. Canvas to canvas in one generation?