Goldfish

There have been some odd goings on in our garden.

We have a fancy goldfish pool on the patio.  We originally introduced 4 goldfish, but 2 died, so now there are 2.  There's a small fountain, and plenty of oxygenator weed.  We feed them a bit sporadically, as there is plenty of algae for them to snack on.  They seem happy enough.  I didn't feed them yesterday, but I had last fed them a couple of days ago - I know there was at least one fish in the pool that day.

This morning, as I walked out to go down to W by the pond, I thought there looked to be considerably less of the oxygenator weed.  I assumed W had been having a clear out, and thought no more about it.  We decided that the garden pond needed a clear out of the rampant vegetation, and also some of the oak leaves that are now falling from the tree.  We haven't introduced any fish to the garden pond, as it is meant to be a wildlife pond.

As I was lifting vegetation with a rake, I spotted a goldfish!  At first, I thought I must be mistaken, but we both saw him.  We speculated about where he could have come from - he looked too big to have come in as an egg on a bird's foot.  We wondered if someone had come over the hedge from the field and rehomed their goldfish in our pond.  I suggested that we should try to catch him and pop him in with our other goldfish.  But then he disappeared down to the deeper end of the pond. 

We left it at that, and got on with clearing the weed.  There is a lot of native oxygenator weed in the pond, and as we were clearing some of it, we found some of the non-native oxygenator that is often sold for goldfish bowls (and is in our goldfish pool).  We'd had a little of this weed in there once before, and our pond man had warned us not to let it remain, as it would overwhelm the native stuff.  So we just lifted it out, and carried on.  After a while, I went back to the house to make a cuppa, and as I was passing the pool, bethought myself that I ought to feed our goldfish.  And I discovered that the goldfish were in fact no longer in the pool!

At this point, the obvious was finally rammed home to us - someone had not only transferred at least one of our fish from the pool to the pond, but also a good quantity of weed!  We've managed to net one fish, and have put him back in the pool - as blipped.  We haven't seen the other one at all - is he in the pond, or has someone taken him home?

Presumably it was someone's idea of a prank, but it's all left me feeling rather upset - someone has after all been into our garden without our knowledge, and must have come knowing what they were going to do, and prepared with a net, and a bucket.  Quite apart from the fact that they've introduced a non-native, rampant oxygenator weed and a non-native fish into our wildlife pond.