Losing a pet while making the news
The Highlands Current recently reported an interesting koi story from the village of Cold Spring, New York. It has all the elements — action, suspense, death and heartbreak.
When local business owner Christine Ortiz found her car’s rear window smashed in by a koi – one that had likely fallen from the clutches of a hawk in flight – she got to wondering where it came from:
To be precise, it was a koi. But how did it end up in the backseat of her Subaru?
Talon marks indicated the fish had been taken by a raptor, possibly an eagle or hawk. Ortiz felt it was unlikely to have come from the brackish Hudson River; koi are freshwater fish. “I felt bad; I knew someone was missing a pet,” Ortiz said. “That’s why I didn’t post anything” on social media.
Even without the help of social media…word travels in a small town, and eventually, a local koi enthusiast was identified as the owner:
Phil Heffernan, who lives on Church Street and has a koi pond in his backyard, was in California when he received a text from [a neighbor]. His pond lies just three blocks due east of where the fish met its end.
[The neighbor] sent along […] photos. Heffernan confirmed it was his koi, and that it had a name: Lucy.
The article takes a light hearted angle to the incident, despite including a grisly photo of the scene where Lucy met her end, and a sad shot of Mr. Heffernan kneeling, as if in mourning, next to the humble pond he apparently has maintained since 1990.
Lucy was not a small fish, which means she’d almost certainly been with him for a number of years:
“The hawk’s eyes were bigger than his claws and he grabbed the biggest fish he could,” Heffernan said. After flying three blocks, the bird must have lost its grip on Lucy, who weighed 8 to 10 pounds.
It explains the damage…and why Mr. Heffernan had gone so far as to give her a name.
It’s immeasurably worse to lose a fish the way Mr. Heffernan did than to see it lost to a predator under normal circumstances.
At least in the latter case, you know this is – in some ways – how it was “meant to be.” That at least your pet’s loss is sustaining another creature’s existence, however meager a comfort it may be.
But to lose one as described in this story – where the pet died horribly, photos splashed across the newspapers, and the predator didn’t even get a meal due to some animalistic mixture of primal greed and incompetence, you’d have to just be thinking to yourself: “…seriously?”
There may be plenty of fish in the sea (or, in this case, pond). But that still doesn’t take the sting out of losing one you’ve taken care of and grown to love. RIP, Lucy.
Many years ago, I lived in an undesirable neighborhood in an undesirable city somewhere in these United States. There I had a small pond that I’d stocked with some very simple koi.
“Simple” because I’m not actually sure, in hindsight, that they were koi at all. They weren’t fish I’d paid for or even really sought out…when friends and others in the community heard I’d – out of curiosity – revived an old pond in the backyard (left behind by the previous owner and made from a plastic kiddie pool), the offers began to flow.
Before long there were six fish in there. In all likelihood they were goldfish. But what did that matter? I didn’t know any better. What mattered was: they looked cool, and they were mine.
New to fish keeping, predators were a big concern. On the other hand, most of the preventative measures available were ugly and detracted from the beauty of the pond. Deciding to chance it paid off. The fish remained safe without a single preventative measure for the better part of a year.
I was working at the time, sometimes traveling for large stints, and I’d hire a man known around the neighborhood to do “odd jobs” to feed the fish while I was away. Beyond that, the whole pond basically took care of itself.
Until one time I came back from a business trip and found two of the larger fish missing. It seemed a predator had struck. A pair of raccoons, including a unique and apparently rare white one, had been spotted around the house recently. They’d probably had a good meal.
It was only months later that I discovered the truth. I was in the process of moving out, and was giving the remaining fish (those four who hadn’t disappeared, all still happy and healthy) away to a neighbor who had a pond of his own.
We got to talking, and he mentioned that he had also seen some fish go missing over the past year. Not only that, but they’d gone missing under similar circumstances: he’d been out of town and had that same neighborhood fellow helping with the pond while he was away. When he got back? A trio of his largest koi were nowhere to be found.
It was clear at that moment: the fish had been taken by a predator. But it was man, not beast.
In many ways it’d have been better to have just settled on the raccoon theory…at least then, there could have been some closure from knowing this was just the circle of life existing as it always has.
Sort of like if that hawk could have just kept Lucy in his clutches to begin with.