Yes, we have a serial killer in our midst: brutal and ruthlessly efficient. The Boss thinks at least 10 victims, if not 12. And it’s happened right under my nose, so I’m being blamed for it.
It’s like having the Boston Strangler in the neighbourhood. Even closer — in the backyard!
We found out this way. The young Missus was looking out the window at a kookaburra sitting on the fence and noticed something odd: “Look, that kooka has something orange in its mouth. What’s it eating?”
We followed her gaze and, at that very moment, the kooka threw its head back, much in the same way as I snaffle a chicken wing and flick it skywards for rapid inhalation. Except it was tossing up a hapless goldfish for the same treatment — down the hatch!
It didn’t take us long to work out where the goldfish might have come from — The Boss’s carefully tended pond, full of water lilies, large and small water plants … and a healthy colony of black bass and goldfish.
In a quarter century The Boss has never seen it. Herons maybe, but not kookaburras. Birdlife Australia doesn’t think so, either. It’s description of kookaburra feeding behaviour says: “Laughing kookaburras feed mostly on insects, worms and crustaceans, although small snakes, mammals, frogs and birds may also be eaten.”
We all know about the birds. For years The Boss had ornamental fig trees on the balcony, undercover, and it was a favourite spot for the blue wrens to nest — until the eggs hatched, and some tiny chicks appeared, noisily demanding food from mum and dad. Within a day or two, a kooka would spear in and obliterate the nest like a Putin drone on Kyiv, taking the baby wrens with it.
Efforts to screen off the spot, so the wrens could move in and out (but the larger kookaburras couldn’t) were to no avail and the figs were dispensed with, to spare The Boss and the Missus from the carnage. So they knew laughing kookaburras have form.
The Birdlife description adds: “Prey is seized by pouncing from a suitable perch. Small prey is eaten whole, but larger prey is killed by bashing it against the ground or a tree branch.”
The Boss started researching more sites to see if the offending murderer was a genetic mistake — but found this entry in Wikipedia: “Kookaburras are almost exclusively carnivorous, eating mice, snakes, insects, small reptiles and the young of other birds. Unlike many other kingfishers, they rarely eat fish, although they have been known to take goldfish from garden ponds…”
We can now confirm that. While I felt bound to shoo the offending rascal away — he decamped in unhurried fashion to the other side of the yard — the family made a beeline for the pond, where they couldn’t find a single goldfish.
On last count, there had been at least a dozen. Later in the day, they spotted two smaller fish hunkering low under the water plants, but most of them had gone — harvested over a few days by a kookaburra who thinks he’s an osprey.
The Boss is in no mood to restock. He says feeding me and New Boy is expensive enough without indulging in another pet. Woof!
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