Feeding & Nutrition

I never wanted a pond. It was already there when we moved in, a kidney-shaped trench of green water with two embarrassed goldfish and a liner that leaked at one end. My plan was to fill it in. Then my partner bought three koi on a whim, and suddenly I was the keeper of a pond, whether I liked it or not.

Koi eat a specific floating pellet, and I bought the big tin because it was cheaper per kilo, and I left it by the pond in a plastic box because carrying it back and forth was a faff. The fish learned the splosh of the scoop and would surface in a lazy orange cloud the moment I appeared. So, it turned out, did something with a longer neck and worse manners.

The heron came at dawn. I found the first koi on the lawn, wet and very dead, and a set of footprints that told the whole story. The bird had worked out that the pond was a buffet with no lid, and over the next fortnight it took fish the way I take biscuits, one at a time, without a trace of guilt. The floating food tin, sat open by the edge, was basically an invitation.

I moved the tin indoors. I netted the pond. I bought a decoy heron, which the internet swore by and which the real heron ignored completely, probably because it could tell the difference between a statue and a snack. The net helped. The heron couldn't land in the water, so it stood at the edge and glared, which I chose to read as respect.

The feeding changed too. I stopped leaving food out, scooped only what they'd eat in a minute, and stood there while they took it, because a stray pellet on the surface was a dinner bell for wildlife I hadn't invited. The koi got used to the new rhythm. The heron got used to the net, and after a while stopped coming, or found someone else's pond with a looser lid.

I still don't love the pond. It leaks, it breeds frogs I have to rescue from the filter, and it demands a tin of food I now keep under lock and key in the shed. But the three koi are fat and orange and weirdly social, and the heron taught me more about perimeter security in three weeks than any burglar alarm ever did. The lid wasn't locked. Now it is.

The koi themselves were not cheap, which is the part that still stings. Three fish, a small fortune, dropped into a pond I'd planned to fill in, and the heron treated them like a free sampler at a market stall. I watched the population thin with the grim fascination of someone who knows the bill and can't look away. The tin, sat open and inviting, felt afterwards like negligence with a lid.

The leak, the one I'd meant to ignore, I finally fixed with a patch kit and an afternoon of swearing, because once the heron had been seen off I actually wanted the pond to hold water. The liner, old and brittle at the edges, took the patch grudgingly, and the level held. For the first time since we moved in, the kidney shape looked like a pond instead of a problem with ambitions.

What I didn't expect was the frogs. Once the net kept the heron at a distance, the frogs moved in, a raucous spring congress that lays eggs I then have to net out of the filter before they clog it. The koi ignore them. The heron, denied the easy meal, stopped coming, or found a neighbour with a looser lid, and the pond settled into a truce between the species that actually belong there.

My partner, who started this by buying fish on a whim, now does the morning scoop and stands watching the orange cloud surface like it's a small miracle. I won't say I love the pond. But the tin lives in the shed now, locked, and the fish are fat, and the heron has moved on, and the frogs chorus at dusk, and a thing I meant to fill in became, against all my intentions, a reason to go outside.

I'll keep the tin locked in the shed, and I'll keep the net on through the heron months, and I'll keep scooping only what the fish will eat before the water closes over it. The pond, which I meant to fill in, is now the first thing I check in the morning, before the kettle, to see if the orange cloud is rising. My partner was right about the koi, as they usually are, and the heron, for all the trouble, taught me to actually keep the thing I'd have thrown away, rather than the thing I thought I wanted.