Keeping phesants safe in pens

[bobajob 55]

 Hi guys looking g for a bit of advice  on  what is best and what ideas  have you guys got to put on /round  pens to keep birds of prey  at a distance from the pens .. they are quite covered but one side of a pen  is fairly open. .I have hung  CDs  on string across the front .. it did help a bit  . But still open for more ideas and suggestions. 

[shovel leaner 7,648]

I’ve got mixed feelings about diversionary feeding . I’ve tried it myself and found that I just ended up with a few birds reliant on the feed , and some birds not interested in being fed at all, and all you end up with is a lot of BOP.  I’ve found that buzzards vary so much in their demeanour. Some are benign and some are aggressive killers . Gos  hawks are the worst thing you can have around a pen . Kites don’t give me much trouble nor do sparrow hawks . It’s something that as a keeper you have to deal with . The fact is that if you put birds in a release pen , avian predators will want to eat it’s contents. It tends to be that buzzards hang  around waiting for a sickly or runty poult , but it’s the disturbance that tends to be the problem and not what they eat . A BOP hanging around stops the poults eating and drinking freely because they are cowering under a bush .  
           Hanging up cds doesn’t work and looks messy and unprofessional. I’m sorry I can’t give you a definitive answer of how to discourage BOP .
                 
          

[foxdropper 17,092]

Any killing usually stops by week two and in this day and age loses are part of the game .Plenty of cover for birds to run to and plenty of feeders for them to return to .Tawnies were always the menace on our shoot ,taking birds until they were too big to carry .The buzzard sometimes gets the blame for feeding off the remains of owl kills as owls seem only to eat the neck and back of the poult .Kites the same .No experience of gos here luckily but sparrow hawks can be bad around partridge rearing pens .Rearing pens attract wild birds that seem to get pegged against the sides very easily .
Only deterrent is to be there but not possible  all the time .