Eyes like a Hawk

I do live out in the country. It's nice here. I have chickens running around. Cattle mooing. Horses prancing. Hawks hunting. Yep, Hawks. That's my only guess as to why I only have one fish left. The water was a bit murky, I could never really see all the fish at one time. Over the last few days I've been working on the little problems I had it never occurred to me to protect my fish. The tank is outside and wide open. My chickens have cover specifically because of flying predators. Now I'll have to give the same consideration to my fish. I did cover the lonely little guy with plastic to try to keep him safe. It's a temporary fix, I'll figure some kind of lid very soon.

I got a few things for the tank today. I got the test strips in that I've been waiting for. Turns out I have very little ammonia and very little nitritres/nitrates. That makes perfect sense, considering I have no fish. My main concern was chlorine. I did add some water from the hose yesterday. I guessed right and it was ok to add that water. The chlorine level looks less than .5 ppm.

The next new toy was an aerator. I've never owned a fish tank and didn't realize the thing sat outside the tank. I looked over about 5 aerators and decided on the one that I'll have to protect from the elements apparently. Eventually I'll build a greenhouse around the AP system. I set it up in a spot to do that originally. For now, I'll just have to keep the thing covered in case of rain. The other thing I have to come up with is a better way to run all this electric equipment. You would think an electrician like myself would have the full set up, but no. Electricians are just like mechanics. Mechanics have the worst running cars. I'll get to that electrical safety stuff later, for now it's just extension cords all over the place.

The last little thing was a filter. It's a pretty big generic filter designed to be cut to fit. I just set the whole thing in the grow bed for now right where the water pumps in. I'm trying to clean up that water a bit. I don't want it to filter out anything but dirt. It seems to work pretty good.

So my daughter and I are going to watch Secretariat tonight. On the way home I'll have to stop and get some more minnows. I'll try not to feed the hawks this time.