Spit & Polish: 05 February 2012

A pond, fish and a flock of cunning hadedas - sometimes nature drives me to distraction

Be warned that I am about to unravel a violent tale of pre-meditated murder and insatiable greed. It's entirely my fault, because I was looking on that pestilential and elusive thing we foolishly call "the bright side".

I believe that life is precious and God-given, and we tamper with it at our peril, but when greedy predators invade my garden, I stand my ground and fight back. As the poet Tennyson said, it's "Nature red in tooth and claw", which also seems apposite to the current ANC power struggle, but that's a column for another day.

Putting rhetoric aside, let me state the facts of the incident. I created a wilderness garden in my neat, orderly suburb, much to the dismay of my neighbours. Their lawns are manicured; their standard roses stand straight, all at the same height and their beds of carefully massed flowering plants produce an array that Monet might have painted.

They do art, but I do nature and I'm a privacy geek. The less people know about me, the more I like it. But this column is not about garden wars. I'm just setting the scene, because the wildness of my garden attracts all kinds of birds and other creatures.

During that sharp, long winter we had last year, I felt so sorry for the birds that I created a prominent feeding station, on top of a high wall. I placed big, shallow ceramic bowls, filled with bird seed, chopped fruit, and soaked dog pellets, which the birds saw as a luxurious treat.

My backyard was filled with glossy starlings, doves, loeries, barbets and all kinds of beautiful creatures which pleased me a great deal.

I did not expect to see the hadeda ibis, but they arrived in flocks and they are tenacious, noisy and greedy. Even the mynah birds were intimidated.

There they were, every day, as many as 12 of them, standing on the wall yelling for food and - daft as I am - I just kept on feeding them, and that's when the murder happened.

When I made my garden I built quite a large, natural-looking series of fish ponds, with a cascade over rocks into a pool, with an overflow into two smaller pools, and from there into a large pool.

I bought eight mature koi fish, four for the top pool and four for the bottom and it was tranquil, peaceful and perfect - for a day at least. Those damn hadedas saw the pond with the glittering gold and silver fish swimming in it, and decided that the pool was their own personal buffet.

I knew nothing about avian cunning until I had to deal with the hadedas. I had previously decided that the mynah bird is the devil's own pet, but that all stopped when the hadedas arrived.

Because I was not home all day staring at the fish, I naively assumed that the cycles of nature in the garden would be harmonious. But I soon noticed that the koi were acting skittish, hiding under the rock ledge and lurking under the water-lily leaves.

When I fed them I saw damage on their scales but I did not make the connection until I saw three hadedas standing on the edge of the pool using their long, scimitar-like beaks trying to catch them.

I thought fish were quick, until I saw these flashy predators in action. It was obvious that their thin beaks would not possibly be strong enough to carry the fish away (the koi all weighed just under a kilogram) and their claws were not big enough to lift a fish up. Their plan was to treat the pond as a plate of sushi, nibbling bits of the living fish. I lost two fish before I realised what the birds were doing - and then the battle of the hadedas went into overdrive.

Pet shop assistants advised that I use a net over the ponds with thick, strong plastic ropes, but that was as ugly as sin. Then a friend suggested using thin, shiny, silver fishing-line.

He helped me to weave an intricate web that was attached to the rocks on the cascades and the edges of the pond and attached to the branches over the trees around the pool. The result as was an airy, stringy sculpture that sparkled in the sun, and it scared the hadedas away. But, immediately, agile spiders started spinning their webs between the lines of gut.

They look wonderful in the early sunlight, especially when the dewdrops on the strands hang like diamond pendants, but foolish insects fly into the webs, were they are caught and killed by the spiders. They cocoon them and feed off them, creating another bunch of corpses, waving gently in the breeze.

I suppose it's the way nature works, and I suppose that I should butt out and leave the cycles to do their thing, but it irks me. It's like that little verse that goes:

"Great fleas have little fleas that niggle, itch and bite them and smaller fleas have smaller fleas and on, ad infinitum."

That pretty much sums up what we call the natural cycle of life, but it had me reaching for the Valium - or the whiskey - whichever was nearest.