Neighbours Kids Won't Leave Our Ducks Alone!

[Doobly]

I would have called the police already.... I count that as harassment to you and the birds

I did have to call the police on the neighbours on the other side (one of the kids in question is theirs... they all play together!) because they fitted a security camera pointing at our front door and their landlord wasn't co-operating when we asked him to get them to move it. It was pointing at nothing but our front door for 7 months!

 

[Helloworld]

You should move.

 

[Doobly]

I'm in the "try to work with the neighbors" camp. Go to the parents and try to get them on your side. Don't go over raging about the kids, if you think you've got your momma bear up, think how those parents will react. Just be calm and reasonable and try to find some common ground. Maybe bring up the worry about the fence collapsing, that's a safety issue for the kids, as well as cost to them for repairs, as it is a common fence. If all else fails, enclose your duck yard so they can't throw things into it. Good luck.

Thank you for your well-measured advice. I do worry about the fence too to be honest! We own the fence that side of our property and I really don't fancy chasing for the money for repairs, or worse, finding a child injured and all the heightened emotions around it. They are standing on plastic kids furniture to peer over too, it's not safe at all.

 

[Doobly]

You should move.

My goodness, I know. Our boys are 3 and 7 months and this wasn't the neighbourhood I envisioned. I'm very bitterly sad about it as I fell in love with this house and never had trouble for the first two years we were here. Our youngest was even homebirthed here! But we are desperately preparing to go, sadly, and hopefully.

 

[Helloworld]

A camera and police

 

[Helloworld]

A camera and police

We just did this a yr ago. Kids kept using paintballs on my birds and killed my two Lavendar Guineas. We moved.

 

[Feathers Brady]

doobly! Yes! I feel your pain with unruley neighbors.
I agree to the electric fence .
I would definitely announce this and post " keep off the fence" or " no trespassing " or both!
There's nothing wrong with glaring or electric fences when it comes to protecting helpless creatures being antagonized.

 

[coach723]

Another temporary solution, if space and $$ will allow it is to double fence. Like a moat to keep the kids and ducks farther apart. You could also run some bird/wildlife netting over the top of that side to help stop larger objects from being thrown in (like golf courses put up, would also 'capture' the evidence for pictures as it would end up on the netting or in the 'moat'. I'm so sorry, I have much sympathy for you. We had neighbors like this once, luckily our yard was large enough to avoid them most of the time, but it was not fun. They would scream obscenities at us and threw eggs all over our pool deck and in the pool. Police were called, eventually they left and rented theirs out, we eventually moved also. Having crappy neighbors is absolutely the worst.

 

[Helloworld]

Our new next door neighbor just moved because the man next to him had a peacock. He was like a rooster.. sounded off in morning and evening. He shot and killed the bird. There was a supposed fight between my 83 yr old neighbor and a 60 something year old neighbor and then our neighbors packed up and left. It is crazy in the woods too.

 

[Doobly]

We just did this a yr ago. Kids kept using paintballs on my birds and killed my two Lavendar Guineas. We moved.

God that's horrible. I'm so sorry. We keep finding BB gun pellets in the garden and that's another fear. The peacock though! That's crazy. I've always believed if you live rural you know animals are part of the package. We used to hear a peacock when I still lived with my parents in the New Forest, it was lovely. Had a stray white penhen visit too that one of our Appleyards took a fancy to! They were quite similar in colour Both female and a lot was lost in translation so she got herself pecked a couple of times!