Travel Tips

My boss got a great idea for making a beautiful, peaceful sanctuary in the courtyard of our office building. After much coming and going by construction crew, we ended up with a quite nice setting with several patios for meeting or eating or just taking a quiet break. There's a beautiful waterfall at the top of the courtyard and a stream meanders down to a pond on the other side of the space. Then we planted the water lilies and other pond plants, added a turtle and koi fish!

Imagine our surprise when the next day the koi fish were gone.

Enter the giant blue heron! Don't ask me how he knew there were koi fish in the middle of a courtyard totally surrounded by a two story building. By day two of the pond, the fish were gone. How could one bird eat so many fish?

So what did we do? We bought more fish. Dumb.

Blue heron are territorial birds. Mr. Google tells us that if you put in a fake blue heron, all real blue herons will think that your pond already has its resident bird and stay away.

Well, clearly that didn't work. I think he thought the fake heron was just pointing out a food supply!

Blue Heron apparently don't like alligators! So we bought this snazy solar powered alligator head that roams around the pond. See him there in the pond? Doesn't the heron look frightened?

Then we took the last action and put an ugly net over the whole thing. That's our heron, under the net.

I guess he's watching to see if more fish are going to be coming down the stream into the pond. Forget it fella! We're done feeding you pricey sushi. Welcome to our beautiful bird sanctuary!