I got up this morning & every fish is gone & all the plants are trashed...well, my ponds lasted about 3+ months :-(
Not much I can do now since I have to get to work. I just cleaned out all the dead plants & the dead misquito fish that must have gotten crushed in the battle.
Noooooo!!!!! And your pond survived the July 4th fireworks but not racoons. That is no good, no good at all I say! Perhaps you can build a new one... that way you can ice scate on it during the winter if it gets cold enough, but then again I suppose that doesn't happen in San Fran
Eric .. make another pond , but put what we call "chicken wire" over it .. that is wire that you use on bird avairys .. ya make a "dome" of it to cover the pond .. it stops the magpies and ravens gettin at the fish !!
It was definitely racoons & yeah I'll be making a chicken wire frame to cover the bathtub portion of the pond...the upper pond will only be for plants from now on. Luckily my mom has a large racoon trap that I just picked up on the way home from work...
You can see pictures of the poor fish & the ponds from about a week ago...I haven't posted the one "after" pic I took yet. Since I don't use pond liner, there are no leaks, just shreaded plants & a bunch of baby misquito fish that were too small to catch or eat... The racoon trap didn't get a nibble last night...if I can catch one or two of them maybe, MAYBE I'll get more goldfish sooner than later...
Get a few adult piranha...certainly would be a surprise for a city-dwelling raccoon, dipping its paws into that pond thinking it had found another free sushi dinner! However, I am sure the remaining small mosquito fish would be gobbled up in quick order...so perhaps it would be a bad trade-off in the long run.
Now I need a beast that will eat both racoons & algae too! After cleaning out the mud & other junk I also threw the ponds off "balance." Which means with just a few hot sunny days my ponds are choked with string algae!
I still haven't trapped a (the) damned thing...I did move the one goldfish from my front yard container to the small pond in the back yard today. Maybe that will do the trick & get those 'coons to come out of hiding...lol
Author
Logged
And your pond survived the July 4th fireworks but not racoons. That is no good, no good at all I say! Perhaps you can build a new one... that way you can ice scate on it during the winter if it gets cold enough, but then again I suppose that doesn't happen in San Fran
