Not looking for sympathy, just thought I’d show you what we’re up against. This thing is not afraid of anything and I got soaked and practically had to tackle it to make him fly away. The pool he’s in is a pool where we had 12 fish we were giving away. There’s only 1 fish left. There are scales littered over the bottom of our main pond, and you can see the splats of where he picked of frops. As best we can tell he’s eaten a few of our special fish and there’s one injured one with a hole in his side we have to catch and euthanize.
Our netting should arrive sometime soon.
By the way, the closer I got to it, the more I started to think it was a bad idea to take it in a wrestling match fight. It had this wild-killer Pterodactyl look in his eyes. And he’s fricking huge. At least 4 foot tall.
I took one quick pic before running out (from inside the house through a screen window). Is it just me, or is that a yellow DNR band on his left leg (hard to see since his right leg covers it up)?
Mentioned this to my Mom, she said she has a friend in GR who had a blue heron that found their fish pond – it wouldn’t leave until all the fish were gone. Wonder if it’s the same one.
You have the most interesting problems of anyone I know – if it weren’t eating all your fish/frops, it’d be awesome to have hanging around you yard :)
Maybe you could put out a heron feeder so the bird goes for your cheap food rather than frogs & fish? I have no idea what you might put in a “heron feeder”, or even if such things exist, but… shrug. Might be worth looking into.
You need an animal in the yard that will scare away herons but spare fish and frops.
Most of the animals that occur are silly, though: llamas (such as shepherds use to repel coyotes), ostriches (though for all I know they’ll eat fish and frops).
I feel like dogs will ignore fish but chase frops. Anyone know?
YOu know… I was thinking eariler today that I wish our cats were “outside cats” for the first time… and then I remembered this pic of a Heron eating a teenage duck and realized our cats wouldn’t stand a chance against a Heron of this size.
But Jen came up with something brilliant. Our netting didn’t come with the UPS guy today, so we needed something quick. Jen went to the store and got some heavy duty fishing line, but what I’d been thinking was putting stakes in the ground and stringing the line ~1" off the ground so when the Heron “walks” to get into the pond/bog he’ll catch his foot (which is supposed to irritate and frustrate them). INstead, Jen tells me she has a different idea and grabbed all the tomato and tree poles we have - and in just 45 minutes built an literal fence out fishling line encompassing the ENTIRE bog and pond. We also got a tin of tennis balls so I don’t have to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. I’ll throw them and hit him in the hindquarters.
Necessity certainly is the mother of invention. Of course now we really can’t get in to fish the injured fish out… anyone have some scuba gear?
Ooh, you know what? you could string the line ACROSS the water in places, so the beast is tripping over it while wading! That’ll surely interfere with his hunting, and the fish and frops won’t care that the line is there. You could even string it just below the surface.
Yeah I grew up with Herons and egrets wading around in my back yard, and they have pretty much no fear of cats, and aren’t really all that afraid of people either.
My dad put in a rather large pond on their rural property, and it’s a constant struggle to manage the ecosystem out there. Gotta have fish to keep some other fish from getting out of hand, but those fish attract other critters they don’t want… As I recall, he actually got a special permit to shoot herons or whatever bird was harassing his baby bream and bass.
I remember herons shitting and puking if startled when we lived out in coastal South Carolina. I’d be wary about chasing them around (them beaks is huuuuuuge), but throwing shit at them always worked for us. Wing it a couple of times with a softball – they’re not hard enough to hurt it, like a baseball might, unless you’re like a really good pitcher or something.
If that doesn’t work, a pellet gun is a great investment – works on children and animals alike!
