The secret to not needing a beer after mowing the lawn is to do it in the morning instead of the evening right before cooking the BBQ.
I tried everything possible to eradicate the mosquitoes from the water feature in my backyard. I added a pump to aerate the water (well I paid some guy to do that). I added plants. I dumped in NoMoz every few months. I even added a school of white cloud minnows back in 2022 to try and help, although they all died probably from birds or those days in summer I walked outside and found the water level nearly bottomed out.
I also made a lot of effort to control the algae, with slightly better results although not that much better.
Despite the bug spray and the thermacell it's basically a guarantee that I'll be eaten by a mosquito any time I'm out there having a snack, gardening, or encouraging Nash to do her business so that I can get to bed.
Vanessa is also sick of mosquitos, and after enduring my attempts for the last few years she made the call this weekend to dump out the water, remove the pump and fill the pond with dirt instead. Good luck breeding in dirt, mosquitos! I'm pretty sure they can, but maybe a lot less.
I really enjoy the trickle and burble of the water feature the couple of times a month I go out there without my noise cancelling headphones on, but given I'd had my chance with the pond I was happy to give her approach a try.
So while I was mowing the lawn, Vanessa was flushing out the water and tipping in the left over soil and potting mix I had from planting the tomatoes last month.
The issue arose when I spotted a fish, darting back under the cover of the big shaft thing in the middle of the pond, after probably sticking his head out to see what was going on with the water. This was not expected. I don't recall seeing any of the fish for at least a year. I'd assumed they were all dead, but there was one (maybe even two) hero fish still living through the worst of my neglect in the water and doing its best to eat as many mosquito larvae as possible.
I am kind to animals. I mean, I am digesting beef, pork and chicken simultaneously while writing this, so I'm not perfect and I seem to have an intolerance to legumes which doesn't help. But I didn't kill my omelette ingredients myself and I slow down for birds on the road and I have a dog that has a better diet than most of the humans in history. And I've also killed a lot of mosquitos, and technically the other 8-9 white cloud minnows that were no longer in the pond with the survivor. What I am arriving at was the dilemma - was saving this one fish's life worth abandoning the gardening work and dealing with more mosquito bites?
The answer was, sadly, no. And I felt really bad about this, and thankfully it was Vanessa who did the dirty work while I pruned some irises.
Kurt Cobain once said fish don't have any feelings and I've never forgotten that, and I took some solace in the words as the hero fish went to his grave to become fertiliser for some lilies.
Fish may not have feelings, but I do, and that's why I am writing this long post to celebrate the fish's life even though I also feel responsible for its death. He must have dealt with a lot of trying circumstances and he probably killed a lot of mosquitos. Although not enough, in the end.
This evening, when enough time had passed from the morning's yard work that the fish was most certainly dead, I was pouring a drink of water from the filter jug when Vanessa noticed that the bottom of the jug was a cloudy jungle of algae.
This seemed fair. I now have a poltergeist fish who will haunt me forever. Or maybe it was because the weather was warm and I left the jug on the windowsill.
