Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Wildlife Management Blue Herons

A bottle works to make them fly off but mine just come back again and again. (Herons that is).

Cecil:

We caught a YP in the pond today that was about 10" long and had an old healed stab wound (chunk missing) from it's dorsal area, right behind the dorsal fin. It was completely healed up. The fish was released back into the pond.

I wonder if some strategically placed inexpensive battery powered motion detector alarms would scare Herons off? The Herons around my pond seem to be skittish of man made sounds. Might work for a small pond.

I haven't found anything that will consistently keep the BH's away from my pond. I bet the fishing line trick would work but mine is too big to try this on.

I do know that they can really take a large fish out of the population...like others here I've found eating size BG and LMB laying on the bank with stab wounds...assume that the BH was interrupted.

I quit worrying about Blue Herons and focus on Cormorants and Pelicans as they do a lot more fish damage than the 3 or 4 Blue Herons that live in the area.

Pelicans are a spring and fall problem; Cormorants mostly a spring problem.

I have found that scaring them off with things zinging into the water all around them works well on both species. A Cormorant hates to fly when cold and wet while a Pelican just plain hates to take flight unless he has to. It both cases it appears to be hard work. After 2 or three scare-offs the word gets around and the Pelicans disappear. Cormorants need multiple encouragements and will eventually give up as well.

The worst possible thing is to have Coromants and Pelicans on the pond at the same time as they work together to harvest your fish for you.

For zinging to work you need to live and work by your pond so you can keep fairly steady zinging pressure on the birds.

Now here again this could be improved. If the decoy had a swinging neck and head like a bobble head that would move with the wind that would make it look much more real. Or had a mechanism that you could set to make the birds neck move down towards the water every 10 minutes or something you could put the battery compartment in the body of the bird. It would just need a little movement and I think it would work much better!!

RC