Otto Pylot wrote:
Our pond is coming up on it's 1-year anniversary. It has cetainly been
an education with algae, fish, plants, etc. Everything is looking
really good except for our new-found bird friends. We have Shubunkin
gold fish and mosquito fish in our pond. All is doing extremely well
with the exception of the periodic missing Shubunkin. We have a crane
that seems to appear after a rainy period and stand next to the pond.
We of course scare it off. However, we seem to have lost about 4
goldfish over the course of our first 10 months. The likely
perpertrator is the crane. Any ideas on what to do with the crane? I
really hate to cover the pond with netting or whatever but we need to
discourage the crane from using our pond as the occassional Sushimi
stop-over. Thanks.

Otto,
You might type the words 'heron + goldfish' into Google or another
search engine to get a sense of what you may be dealing with - makes for
interesting reading.