The Midwest Koi and Pond Club will have their annual show August 25-26 in the Chicago area. The British fall shows commence in September, with the Bristol Aquatic Society (BAS) leading the pack. These are all on the events calendar.
There is an effort afoot to add an on-line purchasing capability for new and renewal memberships. Look for this in the near future.
The Report will now be published with color pages to create a more enjoyable publication. One perennial challenge for the Goldfish Report editor is getting enough contributions to produce a full issue. Please provide any articles, news items, photos, comments and requests to the editor, Vince McCarty, for inclusion in the Report. Vince has offered a set of topics for future issues, to try and get all of you to dig back in your trove of experiences and create a contribution for the Report. These are listed below, with the first on the list due by next month:
The summer advice pieces have focused mostly on keeping ponds. One aspect of pond keeping is predators; they are an inevitable factor in the equation. Rural, suburban and even urban goldfish keepers can be subject to a wide assortment of mammals, birds and herps that find goldfish an easy and delicious prey.
Conventional advice about vertical pond walls, sufficient depth, lily pad coverage and other factors are helpful but no guarantee (as the webmaster recently found out). Covering the pond with netting can help against herons, but is unlikely to deter a raccoon.
The advice piece of this is to be prepared for the eventuality of predation. For valuable fish, you may want to take extreme measures, possibly to the detriment of the pond's appearance. For less critical stock, the advice is much the same as for an aquarium situation; don't put all your eggs in one basket. The GFSA members in the Breeders Circle have tried to address this by spreading rare bloodlines around between several different people.
