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You know, in nearly 30 years here, I've never even seen a heron. Something tells me that if anything got my fish, it wasn't a heron. I'd have to be seeing something suspicious occasionally. I'm still holding out hope that they're just hiding/hibernating because it's been so cold here. It's not even 50 degrees today.
the colder it gets the less fish eat. mine would not eat at all sometimes during winter.
koi prefer right around 62-64 degrees so they may still be in "hibernation" mode, which means theyll find crevices and hidng spots as deep in the pond as possible and pretyt much wait it out.
they can happily survive in 50 degrees (heck even neer freezing) but theyll be alot less active untill the water edges up into the low-mid 60's
Raccoons are not as good fishers as Herons. Those stand in or near ponds and can wipe out a stocked small pond on an hour. They are plentiful in my area so if I build a pond it will have to be at least 3 feet deep. Too much work
Heron and related birds can down literally dozens of fish; and they're "fisherman", cautious and patient and very wary of people..........and they do a migration run right through Utah, so while you may not have seen them, it doesn't mean they don't blow through town.
For birds like these, and racoons, the pond is much too small and much too shallow.
My fish are all alive and well! I guess I just don't know that much about fish, but they have apparently been more or less hiding out under the rock we strategically placed for that very purpose. Now that the weather here has finally warmed up, they're all out and swimming around for at least part of every day. I had pretty much given up hope that they were alive after not seeing a single one of them for over a month, but it turns out I was wrong.
for racoons, you want a steep drop-off so they don't have a shallow they can wade into the pond from; for Herons, at least four feet deep in one place in the pond, AND your fish acclimated to shadows and movement.
I'm in bird and racoon country, and the two ponds I have are doing fine this season. (fingers crossed)
Believe in heron's. They took 6 of my largest koi this summer. We ended up getting a gadget that sprays water when motion is detected by the pond to scare preditor. Hope to think this helped but this was before we got the UV light and pond was green. (which by the way works great to clear pond water). Now I am looking for ideas to protect fish. Which I did get from this forum.
We had big problems with raccoons eating our fish. We installed a large preformed pond and luckily got a bunch of very large and gorgeous butterfly koi from my wife's friend who also had a pond but was moving and wanted to give them away. Everything was perfect for about a week until we started seeing dead fish on the lawn and were also missing fish. The raccoons were not only eating our fish but literally just pulling them out and leaving them on the grass. We got a pond net but they ripped right through it and went in again.
I came to the conclusion tha they were going into the pond and standing on the shelves to catch the fish because they also knocked all of the submerged pots on the shelves to the bottom of the pond. What ended up working for us was a fake floating alligator head that moves around with the motion of the water from the pump and fountain. This has also kept waterfowl and herons away. We do have the pond lit up at night so the gator can be seen and like someone mentioned above have given the fish a pvc pipe to hide in if they need to. Hope this helps someone else to not lose fish like we did and here's a good a guide to the fake gators: The Complete Alligator Decoy Guide.
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my money is on the Heron
