Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Lost to foxes
I'm sorry to report that we lost two of our khaki campbell ducks to foxes last night. This is the first time we have lost anything to predators and I'm really feeling this setback hard. As an emergency measure, we have put 6 of the latest duck eggs into the incubator to try to restore stock levels though anything that hatches won't be laying until early next year. We have also had to put back our quail plans. With the incubator in use for the duck eggs, the quail eggs will have to wait a month. That means it's unlikely that we can go into quail egg production this year. This is all a setback and I feel a bit upset at the loss of the two ducks, but we will recover. Indeed, we have been surprised that we have not had losses to foxes before now.
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3 comments:
Don't you just "love" those folks from a certain animal charity, who catch injured city foxes and then let them go again! Anyone who keeps chickens or ducks will sympathize with you. So sad.
Now that the fox knows your allotment is a source of prey, he will be back for more. We lost a whole flock of chickens over the course of a couple weeks that way. You might want to pen them up at night.
The birds are safely in the duck and hen houses at night except for Monday when we were away and a friend was looking after them. From what I understand, she was unable to get 2 ducks into the duckhouse so they were left out overnight. That turned out to be fatal for them.
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