I use a net. I just feel safer after numerous heron attacks. It's not that bad - virtually invisible until you get close. I don't like the idea of fishing line because we have a dog who would run right into it and I don't want to hurt him. Also, we like to get into the pond periodically to fertilize and maintain the plants. All we have to do it take off the net. I don't want to mess with fishing line. We've come up with a pretty good system I think. We drive 4 foot stakes in the pond (3 feet when done) and secure the net to the tops and sides of the stakes keeping it about 6 inches from the bottom so the frogs and birds still have access. But I think the line would probably work if that's the way you want to go. I fence our pond over winter so no one accidentally steps into it - we can get many feet of snow in a season and the fence gives me a guideline since it's right off our patio. Also keeps the dog off it. By the time I can get the net on in the spring, no herons have figured out how to cross the fence - however that hasn't stopped them from visiting. I'm sure they're taking notes! Our fencing is 2-1/2 feet tall. Be sure you string the line as close to the edges of your pond as you can. If the heron can fly into your pond and land on something, the line will be useless.

Thanks, catherinet, for your fast response. We do get many kinds of herons around here, but I've never seen any in our driveway! Do you have any idea why those two birds are grooming next to each other in my photo? Is that usual behavior for them? Thanks, Molie

Jenn, My weekend television (and as far as I know, my backyard) was "alien" free! LOL Judith, Glad you're feeling up to posting a little. Sorry to hear you've probably decided to not build a pond. Right now since it's below freezing I dread going out to do any work on my ponds, but come warmer weather I'll sure enjoy the benefits. Gagesgranny, Some type of cover is the best way to protect the babies. I have used the black plastic bird & deer netting in the past, but only in the winter to stop leaves. Looks like it will be become a more permanant fixture around here. Sue, I don't understand the banning of koi and not goldfish in a lot of places as I thought one was as potentially as much a hazard as the other, but I'm no expert either. I read about the koi being seized from a restaurant and was also happy to read they had been given back to the owner. My goldfish are just as special to me as my koi are so both are fun to have.

The concept of warm and cool colors predates most of the scientific tools we have today to measure color. It originated from the concept of warmth vs cold. the Oxford English Dictionary describes 18th century usage to include: Cold - applied to tints or colouring which suggest a cold sunless day, or the colder effect of evening; esp. to blue and grey, and tints akin to these. Warm - suggestive of warmth, said especially of red or yellow ... to become 'warmer' or more ruddy: "On a bright morning of July, when the grey of the sky was just beginning to warm with the rising day". I always conceptualized the concept as warm-related to the heat of the sun or cool of the water. The scientific difference deals with the sensitivity of the S cone. I am not a neuro science expert, but it has something to do with thresholds of the S cone and how colors change as they are desaturated. Blue goes from blue to darker and darker blue, but we still perceive the color as blue and we name the colors as blue light blue, sky blue, navy blue. When we change the chroma Blue goes from bright blue to gray blue. You can't do the same with yellow. We only see yellow in very specific ranges of light and chroma. We call dark yellow gold or brown and as we desaturate yellow it can either move toward green or violet. At the lowest saturations there isn't any yellow or orange or red. Have you ever heard someone describe a gray as a dark yellow gray? Nope. Beige can be pink, yellow, gold or green and gray can be green gray, blue gray or violet gray. So when the hue is yellow and it is desaturated it becomes olive green or brown - moves toward red or toward green it never stays yellow. At some point it moves to either a green gray or violet gray and looses any association with yellow. Grays are innately cool. - related to water, not the sun. Do you ever picture the sun as gray? Do you ever picture water as yellow? Where is the break between cool and warm? At what level of chroma do we determine that a yellow is no longer warm, but has moved into the cool zone? That may actually depend on your physiology - some people see more colors than other and can discern subtle changes in color better than others. It may also depend on the levels of dopamine in your system - we see colors more vividly when dopamine levels are high than we do when dopamine levels are low. I don't know if their is a definitive answer to your question about Chantilly Lace. Is it above or below the S cone threshold? It seems that the color experts at Benjamin Moore agree with many other color experts and define it as a cool white so my guess is that it is beyond the threshold of chroma where we actually perceive the color as warm even if it is in a CIE LCH hue that is generally associated with the Munsell Yellow Green hue family. BTW - CIE LCH Is linear in nature, where Munsell is not. The Muncell hues curve when mapped against LCH hues. The curvature expands as chroma and luminance are reduced. How we see color and how we measure color are not perfectly correlated.