Not entirely a non-bird matter! At our son’s farm near Adelong NSW, we found and retrieved a live carp (about 30 cm long) in a (now very shallow) dam, where no carp have been placed or seen before. There’s a running water creek about 700 or 800 metres
from the dam, with many carp in it. The dam’s in the middle of a paddock, with no drainage from (or to) it from the creek. Can anyone offer a plausible explanation as to how this obviously healthy carp could have got to the dam? I can think of two possibilities,
but don’t know if they are actually feasible: could a bird have taken the carp – perhaps when a lot smaller – from the creek and (by chance?) dropped it into the dam; or could a bird have taken a mouthful of carp eggs from the creek and deposited one or
more of them in the dam? Are there any other possibilities? It’s been extremely dry in the area for many months, so no possibility of the dam and creek having been “connected” by water, and even after heavy rain there’s no drainage from the (lower level)
creek to the (higher level) dam.
Kevin Bray
