Reckoning without the Rain

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It’s been a bad year for frogs.
They did spawn in the pond as they’ve done for years; but this year there were no tadpoles. Perhaps one of the late frosts was to blame.
This year the fish spawned instead.
Over the summer there were hundreds of tiny goldfish hiding amongst the overgrown oxygenating plants.



I wanted them all to live: but there was no way a hundred little fish would be able to survive in my pocket handkerchief pond.

They had to be re-homed.

Luckily a friend who is a gardener had recently built a series of ponds, for his employer, and he needed goldfish.

It sounded idyllic: deep ponds, lots of food, flowing water and best of all no other fish. So I drained my pond bucket by slow bucketfuls, scooping out the tiny goldfish until all that was left was stinking, black, jellied mud. This black sticky mud stained all it touched leaving me with snaky black tattoos down my arms. I scraped it all of it out, diluting it like a homeopath until I was sure there were no tiny goldfish left.

It took days.

Still I’m sure the rich man would have done the same for me.

The last four tiny goldfish that I found I kept in a square glass vase in the kitchen, while their siblings travelled off to their new utopian life.

My pond was decimated.
Not only had I removed the fish but also all the tiny microscopic life that had been thriving there.
I was a murderer.

The pond consists of two deep parts and there is an underwater ridge that separates the two sections. The large fish had been kept in one section while I’d drained the other.

My four tiny captive goldfish looked miserable too. They watched me as I chopped orange carrots with undisguised fright, yearning for eyelids.

They fled, when I sang and danced on the cold kitchen tiles, yearning for fins that could plug their ears.

Worse they hated it when they swirled in the mixing bowl while I washed the green curtains of algae from their windows.

I had to put them back.

I figured I could put the larger goldfish in the deeper part of the pond. Then I could lower the water level so that the ridge would isolate the shallower section from the other; then I could replant some of the pondweed and set my four captives free in the sanctuary of the shallow part of the pond. I’d left the mud in this part of the pond in the hope that its microscopic life would be able to cling on and repopulate the whole pond one day.
Gently I released the four younguns into their new home.
I saw them briefly swimming merrily together doing a full circuit.
A few days later I saw the bubbles.
Not methane, but the belches of a tench, which was languishing in predatorial style in its mud bath emporium, and burping with satisfaction.
My heart sank.
A few days later a huge heron landed in the garden and gazed at the pond before taking flight.
I sighed again.
Then it rained and I couldn’t go out to see if there were any traces of the tiny goldfish.
Then it rained some more.
Of course I’d forgotten to take rain into account. The water level of the pond has of course risen up and the larger goldfish can once more swim freely over the ridge.

And they’ve done so.

Latest News: To date there has been no sign of the tiny fish.