Rural Gardening: Preditor watch, 1 by sillenye

sillenye wrote:
I have 2 geese that I got to protect my ducks. But one day I came home and my ducks and geese were all in their little pond. I said hey what's going on , then noticed off to the right behind my peach tree a hawk was eating one of my ducks Hatter. It was kind of surreal to see the ducks all acting like everything was OK. This was my lowest pecking order duck.

another time I got to see my ducks in action. (on windy days I have sometimes a dozen hawk sightings , once there was 4 hawks together during migration- i mostly see red tail, and sharp shin and broad wing. ) so anyway, my two males Diamond and Big Red protected the best (beloved) duck Gracie by surrounding her while my other male Spock drove away the low on the pecking order duck Alice. He drove her away from the group so she would be the one picked off. This didn't happen because I was standing there, but it could explain what happened to Hatter and why they didn't seem to care.

I didn't know that having ducks was going to make me really get to id hawks which was something I was always interested in. there is alot of good websites with hawk calls that I review to figure out what I just saw. I read and agree that the best help you could get to prevent hawk attacks is to do things to make crows and ravens hang around (plant some corn for them etc) . Crows once were warning my ducks about something when a hawk dive bombed like 50mph on this crow who got out of the way at the last second. I think that hawk has a nest near my duck pond. Osprey and marsh (harrier) hawk have wings that look like they are hinged. I rather lose one duck to a hawk than have a mink come into the yard that takes everything. Heres one I trapped this spring. He only hurt Gracie a little bit.