Duck housing/pens

[SunnyBrook]

Hi all;

I have been waiting(patiently) for my uncle to build us a new chicken house/duck house. He tore down our old chicken house when our last old chicken passed away a few years ago just from old age. So this spring he said he was going to start building us a new one. Well we waited and waited, and asked him to start... He never did. So I got mad and I brought home a couple of ducklings and some chicks. They soon grew up and were free range on our farm. No problem until they were all roosters on the chickens

Then we had to find them homes. Anyway to make a long story short we built them a huge 30 foot by 7 foot pen. But only a temporary pen because he is "supposed" to be making us a new one. The foundation is laid.. that is as far as he has gone.

We have no problems with wildlife on the farm so we used 2 X 2 wire, T-bars, and netting over the top. It worked great, until the cows started leaning their heads over the wire trying to see what was in the pen(we have 4 cows). Well as they would lean they started to bend the wire. I would fix the wire and the next day the same problem. This morning they must have gone on a lets get in the the duck coop rampage because they bent the 5 foot wire down to almost 2 feet by this morning(since last night) to eat the chicken food. These are by no means hungry cows- just bad ones!! They have an entire field of pasture, a round bale in the barn, and they get dairy text and ground flax so they are by no means hungry. JUST BAD!

Now I need to ASAP get a pen up again for my ducks because of the cows. My sister and are not carpenters and need something fairly simple to build!! What my question is after all that is any one have pictures or ideas that can be built, sturdy(because of the cows) but is easy to make? We have a small house in their for the ducks. Unfortunately because our uncle said he was going ahead on the house we ordered ducklings from a hatchery. So we have 29 Pekin ducklings, 2 white call ducks, 3 Cayugas, an older pekin and 3 Khaki campbells along with 3 chickens in this 30 foot pen. They have their swimming pool and a house on one end and they are very content- well until the cows this morning. I am not keeping that many ducklings but am trying to keep them until we can determine sexes on them. They are just starting to make more "duck noises" instead of baby noises at 5 weeks.

Anyone have pics of enclosures. I am debating about a chainlink enclosure but where we live on Vancouver Island, BC Canada a chainlink enclosure only 10 feet by 6 feet by 6 feet high is around $600... not cheap.
And would need like 3 of these to keep them happy and comfortable!

Thanks!
Kim

 

[geosheets]

If your temporary pen was sufficient until your uncle is done with their new pen, can't you keep the cows away from the pen with an electric fence?

 

[lauralou]

Can you affix boards along the top of the fence, from fencepost to fencepost, then attach the wire to the boards? That should keep the cattle out.

 

[Soccer Mom]

There are only two things that I have found to keep cattle from leaning on a fence: barbed wire or hot wire (electric fence). Unless you know what you are doing, barbed wire is a pain in the youknowwhat to roll out and stretch. I prefer hot wire.