Rural Dwellers

See what the clever blackbirds here in Co. Louth are up to!

I'm afraid the inhabitants of our fish pond have been having a really disastrous winter: First the freeze-up with it's resultant casualties, which I told you about previously. When the ice melted, we found a total of 26 dead fish floating to the surface, nearly all the really big ones 5-6" in length.

Having fished them out over several days, we then realized that a lot of the plants had been badly damaged by the frost, and the rotting vegetation was turning the water an evil shade of green! In order to avoid poisoning the remaining fish, we had to lift the plants out baskets and all. When the weather improves, we will have to pot up whatever we can salvage in new baskets, but for the moment there were very few plants that we could leave in the pond.

This has left the pond with very little in the way of shelter for the fish, but for a couple of weeks we enjoyed being able to see them properly.

Alas! It has also given the local heron a great opportunity, and we have disturbed him on several early morning fishing expeditions. We tried to frustrate his activities by placing poles across the pond, but while they may slow him down, they haven't prevented him from wreaking havoc.

I can't be absolutely sure yet, but I fear Lips may have been among those taken for the heron's breakfast!

I guess there are probably several herons responsible for this decimation, but we have never seen more than one at a time. I hear that the unusually bad winter has been giving herons all over the country a hard time. It seems an awful pity in a way to see our lovely goldfish disappearing in such a gruesome way, but I guess they are helping to keep some of our wildlife heritage fed.

Those of us who have the privilege of living in the country must be philosophical about matters like this. Otherwise we should go and live in the town where we can manicure our gardens as much as we like.

Hope you folks have come safely through the appalling weather of the past few weeks. Here in Louth, we only got the edge of it, bringing us a mere two inches of snow, but even though the temperature only dropped to about -6C, it still felt COLD!!!! Also, our road here was ungritted, and the hilly bits (i.e., outside our gate) were like a bob-sleigh run. I'm sure many of you have had much more challenging conditions to contend with, so I hope you managed to avoid any slipping on ice, and your water kept coming through the pipes.

It's been a hard time for wild-life, and I think it's possible that when we have really hard frosts and little snow, it may be even tougher on some of them, as snow can help to give shelter near the ground. Here, everything just froze solid.

I think I must have spent a fortune on bird seed and nuts. I also made my own bird-cake using lard, which was extremely popular. I wish I could have videoed the antics of the blackbirds who learned to reach it from a twig about 15cms below the bird-cake cage by fluttering their wings to make the twig bounce them up and down, instead of having to keep flying up and down from the ground!

I have a garden pond that we stocked with seven goldfish three years ago. Not only have they settled in very well, but they have increased and multiplied in biblical fashion. We must now have well over a hundred fish! The original stock have grown enormous and very tame, and one of them in particular is so eye-catchingly patterned that we have christened him/her "Lips"! (See photograph.)

This is Lips!

While the majority of the offspring are not as brightly coloured as the original ones, they are still spectacular to see, with glints of gold and red on brown-to-black background. But many of the smaller ones are brilliant shades of red, gold, silvery white, and speckled. Feeding time is dramatic, with fish nearly jumping into my hand to get at the food!

But you can have too much of a good thing, and we are now concerned that overcrowding could lead to problems . If anyone out there has a pond and would like some fish, please get in touch! If you go to Exchange in Forums you can see details of how to go about it. (Or you will be, when we have this facility properly set up!)

I plan to rig some kind of homemade miniature lobsterpot in order to trap them and remove them without the trauma of chasing them around the pond with a net. Anyway, with the amount of plant cover on this pond, its just too hard to catch more than a few at any one time! By the way, Lips is staying here!

I came across a brilliant book recently called "Wildlife Gardening for Everyone". It's a publication of the RHS and The Wildlife Trusts. Obviously, since it's a British publication, there will be references to some wildlife that we don't find here in Ireland, but it's full of very interesting and useful stuff.

I don't know how widely available it is, I found it in a Remained Book Shop up in the North. However, the publishers are Think Books, whose website is www.think-books.com, so it's probably available by mail order.

There are contributions in it by celebrities like Chris Baines (Naturalist and TV Presenter), Richard Briers (who played Tom in The Good Life) and Roger Lloyd Pack (Only Fools and Horses). It covers about every angle you could think of on the subject of making your garden wildlife friendly.

Over the past few days I have spotted one or two butterflies that puzzled me for a little while. They looked rather like Small Tortoiseshells in pattern and shape, and in their manner of flying, but instead of red-and-black, they were orange-and-brown in colour.

The difference is that a hedgerow consists of a whole range of plants of different species, from fully mature trees down to tiny seedlings. A hedge consists of a row of shrubs of young trees of a single species and size, planted at one time, to give uniformity. A hedge will look neater, and its height will be consistent, because they will all grow at the same rate. Often, the plants used will not be native to this country.

This is Creeping Cinquefoil. It invaded the flowerbed round my fishpond. I was wondering how I might eradicate it, but then I decided that it would be much simpler and , more planet-friendly to let it loose there, and grow the other plants it was strangling elsewhere.

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