Little Turkeys

  It occurred to me that I never shared these pictures of the newest batch of turkeys. We ordered 40 broad breasted white turkeys from Ideal Poultry through our local feed store.

  Having the feed store handle the ordering saved me the stress of waiting for them to be delivered and meeting them at the post office. Our feed store actually housed, fed, and watered them for a couple days before I picked them up. The owner also didn't charge me for the ones who died in those first days.

  We set them up in a brooder in one of the extra bedrooms for the first week.

  We like to use puppy pee pads to line the brooder these days. They proved enough traction to keep the little one from having leg problems, keep the area around the waterer dry, and are easy to change out when necessary.

  These pictures are a couple weeks old, and these little guys are actually living in a pen in the poultry house. Pretty soon they will be big enough to go on the ground in one of the big outdoor pens.

Broody henny - part 3

I has just occurred to me that I never did finish telling the story of our broody hen. (Part 1, Part 2)

  Well, she sat on that nest and sat on that nest, and I was very careful never to leave the door to that pen open again. The blessed day finally arrived, and I found a little yellow head poking out from under her chest! A few hours later, I checked back and found that henny had hatched out three little chicks, two perfectly yellow and one black. All was going well, so I left our hen with her young to do her mothering thing and picked up a bag of chick feed on my feed store run that day. 

  That evening I checked back and to my horror found one of the little yellow chicks dead! It's poor little body was all beat up, and I knew there was no way anything could get into that cage. I did some quick googling and found that some first time hen mothers are so broody and so hell bent on protecting their nests that they attack anything that moves, even their own chicks! The other two chicks were still tucked safely under momma, and they seemed fine. I cleared the poor little chick's body and hoped that henny would figure out this whole mothering thing with the other two. After all  the while point of this experiment was to let nature do it's thing and take the burden of incubating and rearing out of our hands. 

  The following morning, I found the hen sitting up on the pole in her enclosure and the other two chicks laid out in front of the door, dead. They had obviously suffered the same fate as their sibling. With a heavy heart, I cleaned out the cage and left the door open for that dang hen to join the rest of the flock for good.

  So our broody hen experiment was a big, whooping failure. Will we try it again? Probably. The weather has been so cold that none of the hens have even thought about going a family way. We also have an incubator full of chicken and turkey eggs that we plan to brood ourselves without the help of a dumb hen who can tell friend from foe.

Broody henny - part 2

  Our broody hen had been sitting on her nest of eggs for about 2 weeks and all was going well. We had another couple hens go broody in that time, so we tucked another nest box next to the first in hopes of going for a double broody hen-a-thon. Unfortunately, the newer hens had no interest in settin for real. They were too busy stirring up a ruckus and pooping on the already broody hen so after the customary 2-3 days in time out, I decided to let them back out into the general population.

  I came out for morning chores and released all the birds as usual then I opened that cage door so that the other two hens could hop right down and into the pasture with the rest of the flock then went about my business feeding rabbits and gathering goats for milking. What I hadn't counted on was our broody hen taking it into her head to jump out of the cage and stretch her legs!

  I came back to an empty cage and a nest full of rapidly cooling eggs in the chilly morning air. I thought surely broody momma would come back to the cage soon. She'd been so dedicated to that nest, I couldn't see her up and abandoning it at the first sign of daylight. My second thought was, crap, birds are rather stupid. This hen has no clue how to get back IN the cage she just left since I had carried her there in the first place. I had to find her, catch her, and put her back in the cage. Only one problem....

  I had already let out the rest of the flock, and we have a lot of white rock hens. Not to mention, trying to get your hands on one hen out in the open who does not want to get caught is darn near impossible.

  I tucked as much hay as I possibly could over the eggs in the nest to try and keep them warm, and Luna and I set out searching for our girl. First, look for a hen in distress. One who looks upset and lost. One who seems to be searching for her nest. No luck. Every hen I saw was just doing their usual chicken thing scratching and pecking and whatnot.

  Ok, don't panic. How else can we identify her? Well, it's been rainy and muddy the last week or so. Look for a clean chicken, one who looks somehow whiter and doesn't have dirt under nails. So Luna and I tried again, searching for the elusive clean-footed broody hen.

  There! Over by the turkey pens! Look how clean that hen's feet are! She looks like she just left some kind of poultry spa and got a full service foot soak and pedicure! Get her! 

  What followed was a good 10 minutes of Benny Hill style chicken chasing in and out of all the pens and around and around the poultry house with Luna trying her best to herd a wild chicken to me and me trying my best not to crack my head on a roosting pole or run face first into a pen door while running top speed after a previously clean-clawed supposedly broody hen! 

  We finally cornered her in the turkey pen, and I was able to scoop her up, screaming and yelling and flapping all over the place (both the chicken and me!) and tuck her under my arm, but not before taking a wing full on to the face which hurts a lot more than you would imagine. 

   I bustled her back to the cage and triumphantly plopped her right in front of her abandoned nest. She took one look at that nest, let out a loud squawk, flew up to the roosting pole at the top of the cage, and refused to come down.

  Ok, don't panic. Either she's just too upset from the crazy chase and will settle down and back onto her nest or I somehow have the wrong hen, but how could that be?! Her feet were so clean! 

  After five minutes, the hen still hadn't come down and I consoled myself to the fact that those eggs would have to come inside and get put in the incubator if they had any chance of hatching. I opened the pen door, took another wing to the face as the hen hot footed her way back out to the pasture and started to gather the eggs into my shirt. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of white doing something rather odd. 

  It was another white rock hen. She was walking around near the cage and what caught my attention was the way she had her feathers puffed out. She would drop her head and spread her wings if another chicken approached her. I'd only every seen chickens do this then they had little chicks in tow. This was our girl!!

  Broody momma was much easier to catch than the first chicken. I sent Luna around, henny puffed up in defense mode, and I snatched her up from behind. I wasted no time in shoving her in that cage, and she immediately climbed into the nest box, settled down on her eggs and started tucking them under her chest with her beak! Luna and I both breathed a sigh of relief. I resolved then and there to band that broody hen and to never leave that cage door open again! 

  

Broody henny - part 1

  We have one cage in the poultry house that opens out into the pasture. We use to as a time out pen for broody hens. You see we keep chickens, a lot of chickens as eggs layers. We count on those chickens to lay their little oblong balls of goodness just about every day. Every once and a while, some bird brained hen will take it into her head to sit on those eggs to try and hatch them. When that happens, the hen stops laying. Really the hen stops doing just about anything. She will sit on that nest nearly 24-7 with a look of zen-like concentration only getting off to eat, poop, and grab a sip of water once or twice a day. 

  For us, that means no more eggs from that hen and an occupied nest box of which we barely have enough as it is for as is. We honestly wouldn't mind the hens brooding their own eggs especially in light of our last incubator debacle, but our dumb hens can't even figure out in which nest box they decided to go broody in the first place and will often return to the wrong, empty box leaving their previously brooded eggs to cool and die. 

  We tried all kinds of way to snap a broody hen out of setting (including dunking in a bucket of water), but the best way we've found is to put the girls in this cage for a few days to cool their heels and get them back with the egg laying program. 

  One day we got the idea of putting one of the rabbit nest boxes into the cages with a couple fake eggs to see if the hen would continue to brood in a more controlled environment. We went through a few hens who just weren't interested, then finally one white rock took up the challenge and plopped herself into that box. After a couple days, we tucked a handful of eggs under her and let her get to settin...

To be continued....