I have two ponds. The small one is 3/4 of an acre and real close to my house. The bigger one is off in the other corner of my land and a nice little walk to get to it. I started out with rouen ducks because the look like mallards, but there are too big to fly away. I bought six, four girls and two boys. The boys killed the girls and for awhile, I just had the two boys. They where mean and always fought with each other until one died. Then I felt sad for the one survivor and bought a few kacki Campbells because I was told that they lay the best eggs. Almost imidiately that male rouen killed a female and started attacking the others. I killed him to remove the problem. I should have done that a lot sooner!!!! Everything was fine for awhile, but then a coyote showed up and killed 5 or six of them. I'm not sure because I found four bodies just laying there and one or two where missing. They would sleep on the shoreline and I think the coyote, or maybe coyotes, just killed them one after another and then took what they could carry. At that time, I just had a three rail fence around the area. I added three rows of hot wire and to the fence, which is about 5 acres. Since then, I have not lost a bird to coyotes, just a few to hawks and owls.
Shortly after that a friend of ours retired and got out of the egg business. They used to sell several dozen eggs a week at the hospital where they worked, but now it's not worth the drive or effort to sell eggs there, so they gave us their Peking ducks, swan geese, merganser Narragansett turkeys and some more chickens. Big score for us!!! I cut the flight feathers off of the ducks and geese with some sissors. It's fast, easy and harmless. They where all used to people, but had never been in a pond before. For about two days, all they did was clean themselves!! They readily came to food and fit right in with with the chickens, goats and horses at the barn. A few got stepped on by the horses and died, but the other 30 figured it out and have done fine. They like to steel the food that the horses drop on the ground from their buckets. It's a madhouse during feeding time with animals everywhere, which we enjoy. Then we noticed that some of the duck where being abused by other ducks and figured out that the males where brutalizing the females over and over again. Not all of the males, just some of them, so we killed them and it's been really good since then. Male ducks can be just like roosters, and the only solution is to remove them. I think we have about 20 ducks and six geese. There is no smell or mess. What's really nice about them is that they take apart the horse manure. Whatever is in there, it's something that they really enjoy!!! They also drop eggs in random places. We're working on changing some things around the barn to encourage them to nest and leave their eggs in the same place, but there isn't a lot of hope for that actually happening. Our bigger goal is to separate the nine goats from the chickens and ducks during feeding time so the goats don't eat all of their food.
