The extraordinary mystery of the flying fish
A surprise 'crop' of dead guppies ends up in the turtle tubs
This morning, as I check the turtle tubs on the second floor, I find something in the water that absolutely doesn’t belong.
In two of the tubs are the dead bodies of guppies. The little fish are simply floating on top of the water. Even though the turtles like a bit of protein with their breakfast, no one has touched the bodies.
Perhaps they have more sense than I suspected. After all, you really shouldn’t eat anything if you don’t know what it’s doing in your tub.
I do have some suspicions as to where these little fish have come from. I myself don’t have guppies. The fish that I keep - a discus (or “pompadour”), some angel fish, and one oscar - all live on the first floor.
My next-door neighbour Khun J keeps guppies on her second-floor patio, though. They'’e part of the ecology of her garden, a most beautiful garden, full of flowering plants carefully and lovingly arranged in their pots.
Some of the pots are home to various kinds of water plants. With the pots full of water, mosquitoes would breed easily, but J has put in guppies to eat any larvae.
This morning, I ask J if she’s missing any fish. It’s a stupid question. She doesn’t know. She simply dumps in a few males and females occasionally and removes any dead bodies when she finds them.
She’s sure she knows how the fish ended up in the turtle tubs, though.
“It was Thep and Thong,” she says. Those two soi cats who treat my house like a cat hotel wander around her patio too. She’s delighted by their presence; a cat who comes to you willingly brings good luck.
“I suppose I’ll have to go to the police to report them,” she says. She’s joking, of course, but there’s a grain of truth in what she says. You’re legally responsible for anything your pet does to someone or to someone’s property.
I doubt, however, that either cat put the guppies in the tubs. The walls and roofs of my patios are covered in mesh to keep my animals safe inside. The cat burglar would have to steal the fish from J’s house, come in by my front gate, climb the stairs to the second floor, go out to the patio and dump the fish in the tubs.
The two cats are clever, but they’re not strong on such long-term planning.
We did have a very big storm the day before. Could the wind have blown the fish onto my patio and into the tubs?
My vet thinks that a bird grabbed the guppies, but unable to hold them, inadvertently dumped them in the tubs, perhaps letting them fall through the mesh on the roof. It’s possible, but what bird in its right mind would fly near a house full of cats - and do it at least twice?
I don’t really know. Does anyone have any other ideas?
