So back now to the fish in the ponds below, with many shifts of population since I last featured them six weeks ago. I mentioned then the new fish I had introduced in June to the waterfall pond, which still goes by that name in my mind though the waterfall has not been used since December when we first found little white babies there.

As I have mentioned, those babies have done well, with several having been transferred to two other ponds down below, the pink tub under the croton tree and the temple flower tree pond. And then there were also the four I moved to the balcony, though they as I noted proved destructive, and I believe even started to feed on the little fish I put in to the same tank.

But the ones down below were productive, as again was noted, those in the waterfall pond producing offspring in July, and those in the temple flower tree pond following suit a week later. But the first lot did not do well, perhaps because there were too many other fish in that pond which I did not remove, or perhaps because the pond overflowed when there was much rain and the babies went over the edge. I do not think that happened, for I bailed the pond out regularly, but the fact remains that numbers dwindled, and there are now I think, not just one as I had feared at one time, but two.

They now lurk on the other side of the pond, while the parents stick to the side where they were spawned and grew up. This I thought was through sentiment, mourning for their lost children, but I soon realized that this attribution of human feeling was excessive and the reason was yet another brood of young ones. This time they, if it is indeed the mother – the father seems again to be the original father, who survived when the mother died – are more careful, and when torrential rains fell they took the babies to a lower level. So there still seem to be at least eight of them, clustered at that edge, though they are shy and appear only occasionally.

I show a host of them in the first picture, taken in September. After that you see one of the survivors of their predecessors, at the top left hand edge of the picture, and that only just. For they, assuming there is still another, are shy and pop under the overhanging rocks when I stoop down.

That picture also shows the plethora of other white fish there from the December generation, and also a couple of the carp I put there in June. In the next picture, though there is no July baby, there are I think three of the red carp, a paler one down at the bottom. The two catfish are not there since, though I see them most mornings, they are rarely otherwise near the surface.

But I have now got more catfish, for that seemed the solution to the predatory white fish up above. So I show finally two pictures of that upper tank where the white fish, though they do occasionally dart at the black catfish, generally keep their distance.