A good friend sends a bushel of interesting items about the life around him which he thinks might interest "some readers". First, he has a fishpond and, like many, got trouble from herons. One took recently "a dear Koi" and six goldfish. He spent £100 getting a stainless steel frame made to stretch nylon netting over the pond. Then a heron returned and dived straight through the netting, taking more fish. In some cases it is recommended that wire stretched around the pond edge at about six inches high will deter the birds, but our friend here had a better idea altogether. He bought a half life-size plaster figure of a woman and placed it beside the pond. sometimes he puts a hat on her and sometimes a scarf. No heron has returned in over a year despite the fact that "they fly over my garden every day on the way to the beach from the Monkstown heronry."
He mentions the fact that mice have been written about here recently. "Well, I was troubled with mice in my last house and found out how to keep them away. You set traps at the end of August and the first pair that come in for Autumn warmth get caught, so a colony cannot be started. Many people make the mistake of waiting, as I used to do, until they were obviously present, but that's too late." He mentions a friend of his who recently got a mice invasion in an outhouse. "Being a man who loves birds, he put out each night's catch to be relished by the magpies. He caught over 50. And on the subject of birds he says that, oddly perhaps, the one feeder he has in his front garden which is on a busy road had been more popular than the two feeders he has in his back garden. The front one has to be restocked every two or two-and-a-half days. Then he decided to prune severely the shrub that held the feeder, but left the actual branch that held up the container. To his surprise, the sparrows and other birds disappeared completely and have not returned a month after. He wonders if birds navigate in gardens by shrub shapes.
The answer is more likely that they were just scared away by the new environment. If you put out a feeder in a new place, it often takes time for the birds to grow accustomed to it, unless, that is, it is just an addition to a row or cluster of the same. One bird man has seven of these machines in a row and can replace or change order without losing any clients.