I hate raccoons. My poor Rouen and Pekin. :(

[RLipinski10]

I should have posted this earlier but... Tuesday my husband found one of our Rouens dead in the corner of the outside coop. His head and neck were completely eaten. And one of our Pekins had blood on her and was missing a lot of her feathers on her wings. What we think happened is, our ducks will lay outside a lot at night up against the fence and it looks like a raccoon had grabbed our Pekin (female) and our Rouen (male) was trying to fight him off by biting him and when he stuck his head out the fence, that's when the raccoon got him.

This is the first bird we lost so it's especially hard for me. I know a lot of people around here don't understand because to them, their birds are just egg birds or meat birds or whatever but I consider them all pets.

Anyways, we let our Pekin swim in our bathtub so she could clean the dried blood off of her and so we could see if she was badly injured. It just looks like the raccoon pulled out a bunch of her big feathers and that's what caused the bleeding on her wings. And there is one scratch on her but that isn't bad at all. She's been living in our bathroom just so she can stay warm, dry and stress free. My hubby and I bought some of those "Sav-A-Chick" packs that you put in their drinking water. They have electrolytes and vitamins. I was wondering if there are any other suggestions anyone has as to what we can do for her? How long should we keep her inside? Should we feed her anything different? Is there anything we should look for?

We also bought some "Blu-Kote" from Tractor Supply but read a lot of bad things about it so we never used it. So if anyone has any suggestions or ideas, please share.

 

[JerseyGiantfolk]

So sorry about your loss and your hurt one!

I've used Blu Kote, it works well because poultry are attracted to red, it keeps the others from pecking at it and if they scratch their own wound and see blood they won't start pecking at it.

Could you post a picture (if you can) so we can see how badly injured it is?


And also

 

[CMV]

Sorry for your loss. Your Pekin should be fine. A few lost feathers and a scratch is not much to worry about. I would Blukote any wounds she has and let her back out to her flock. That being said, you need to make sure your night time set-up is a bit more secure because your raccoon will likely be back for more. Once a predator has some success they keep coming back to the hunting grounds.

Good luck.

 

[RLipinski10]

Thank you for the responses. We ended up keeping her in our bathroom for a couple of days. Then moved her to the hallway near our garage. We also brought our other two ducks in to make sure there wasn't any problems and because our hallway is cooler, we didn't want to move her from a 60 degree area straight outside. They're all doing really good. We put a light on a switch outside and have been keeping our eyes extra open. We have a couple live traps set up out there but we're thinking the raccoon hasn't been back lately because it's been so cold. We haven't seen tracks or anything. We've been locking them inside their coop at night and my husband put wood along the bottom of their coop so if it does come back, it'll have a really hard time getting ahold of another one. This spring we plan on putting some wire mesh along the bottom.

Thanks again!