what do you think happend to my turkeys?

[mommy9994]

I had 2 almost 7 week old bb turkeys (both bronze-- we have both bronze and white) just up and disappear. No feathers, blood, nothing. We may not have been home at the time. One was on Friday, while the children and I were out shopping, the second on Sunday.

They could fly over the fence, but I'm thinking they would have flown back over? It's possible that they wondered to a neighbor-- our closest neighbors don't have animals, and would have returned them, the only ones that would have kept them are on the other side of a cow pasture.

We don't have preditors, no neighbor dogs, no coons, foxes, MAYBE a hawk, but we've not seen one for a long time. Our cats have never killed one of our birds, but of course, there's a first time for everything. No sign of a preditor attack though-- no blood, no feathers, just 1 missing turkey, and the other animals were fine (not shaken at all).

We are really wondering if they were stollen.

If we had been home and there was an attack or a person, Sparkie would have gone nuts. I wonder if a thief would have hurt Sparkie because he would have barked like crazy, but he stays back from people.

We have since been keeping them put up at night and when we aren't home in case of attacks, and letting them loose during the day when we're home.

We've not lost anymore.

What do you all think?

 

[Bossroo]

Where in Va. is this NO PREDATOR paradise??? It just may be that you just haven't seen them, but ... they are out there. The proof is your lost birds.

 

[mommy9994]

You're right, I should say that we haven't seen anything. I've never seen a coon around. There are foxes near us, but we've not seen any on our property, and the hunters keep them pretty thin. We've seen exactly 1 hawk in 6 years, and not at all since last summer. Most of our area is cleared land and used for grazing cattle and corn fields. I'm thinking that the lack of forest area is why not so many preditors. We have lots of wild bunnies-- unfortunately that's what we see hit on the road most often. It's also not unusual to see a harvested field FULL of wild turkeys or geese. I'm not going to say that it's impossible that it was a preditory animal that got them, but judging from what I've seen and the prolific amount of prey that we have-- I don't think we have too many preditors.

If it were an animal, wouldn't there be blood or feathers?