Someone is stealing my Pekin drakes!

[TennesseeTruly]

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No we don't use chicken wire, we learned that very quickly. We used welded wire fencing. 6 ft high. Then along the welded wire fencing is a pvc type heavy plastic fencing so that no ducks can stick their heads out through the 2 inch holes. No critter is reaching through the fencing. They're going over it.

 

[TurtleFeathers]

Laurie -

Birds of prey aren't out of the question, even if you've got heavy tree cover - I've watched hawks drop straight down out of trees and take wild birds from my bird feeder. But thats in the front yard - my dogs are the hawk deterrent in the back yard. The one time we had a hawk attack in the back yard, the dogs were inside. So now, I make sure that at least 2 dogs are outdoors at all times during the day. Thats not to say it won't happen again, but the chances are a lot less.

But STILL - I would think ANY predator would leave blood or piles of feathers! Any chance the drakes could have flown out of their run and been attacked elsewhere on your property?

 

[TennesseeTruly]

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Oh Kat, I wish you could see these fat butts! Fly? They're lucky they still waddle! LOL Everyone asks what I feed them because they're extremely large drakes. But its not just my Pekins, all my drakes just seem to be very very large.

They're definitely not flying anywhere.

This morning no one went outside until 8am and let me tell you, they weren't happy. I have a flock of free range chickens and all my guineas free range. Well they all stayed inside until 8 too. I could almost hear them grumbling when I went to let them out.

Our Great Pyrenees is out all day long and she's a great dog. Our other two dogs, not so much. Steven asked why a bobcat would take a Pekin drake and not the free rangers and I told him that basically the Pekins are sitting ducks. The free rangers can run, fly, hide. The Pekins are a meal with few places to go once we let them out of their main pen. (The main pen has a roof on it.)

Our crows are great hawk deterrents here. We feed a large flock of crows and they, in turn, keep us alerted to hawks. The crows chase hawks off daily.

Laurie