The loneliest poult

  About a month ago we decided to toss a bunch of chicken and turkey eggs into the incubator. Unfortunately, we had a couple of problems with the power to the 'bator during incubation, and we only ended up with one little bourbon red turkey poult from the whole batch of eggs.

  We set up the brooder and kept the little guy warm and well fed and watered, but the poor little thing just didn't seem happy. I tried putting in our trusty stuffed woot monkey in for company, but every time we checked on the little guy, he was just standing in the corner looking lonely.

  I decided to steal one of the hen raised banty chicks that we have running around out back as a companion for the lonely little poult, but kept forgetting to grab one out from under Cynthia during evening chores. Well, Blaze, our barn cat, decided to help me remember one morning by trying to make a meal out of one of Cythia's young brood.

  I had just finished milking when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a chick in distress moving at high speeds behind me. Thinking, there's no way a young chick could move that fast I followed the furious chirping to find Blaze under the milk stand with the little bird clutched in his mouth. Somehow I was able to grab up both animals in one swoop, bird in one hand, cat in other. I tucked the sodden, rumpled little bird into my pocket then had a talk with Blaze about how birds are friends not food and had't I JUST fed him breakfast and just how disappointed I was in his rude and ungrateful behavior! I'd like to say he skulked off with his tail between his legs, but let's be honest with ourselves, we are talking about a cat here.

 Anyway, the little chick was none the worse for his wild adventure in the feline jaws of death.

And now our little turkey poult has a friend to grow up with. At first, he was a little terrified of his brooder mate, but the two quickly warmed up to each other and now are fast friends. It's hard to predict what growing up with a chicken who probably will top out at about 3lbs max as a companion will do to this little turkey, but it should be interesting to watch!

Losses

With the press and craziness of the holidays, I have not had a chance to mention our recent losses here. A couple weeks ago, our poultry were under attack by what was probably a raccoon. It started with one of our remaining two turkey hens. She didn't seem right, was having trouble walking and breathing with an open mouth. We put her in a pen by herself with fresh food and water, but she steadily declined over then next 24 hours and ended up dying the following afternoon. At the time we thought she had fallen victim to our overly large tom's first attempts at breeding his hens. 

Shortly after that I found a guinea dead in the pen with its head pulled through the wire and missing. The pen door had also come open and next to the pen was our remaining turkey hen with part of her neck and back missing and her detached head sitting next to the body. This was very upsetting because we had planned on keeping our two turkey hens with the hopes of getting hatching eggs from them in the spring. I was also rather fond of those girls. 

The next night, we heard a commotion out back. I quickly pulled on my boots and called Luna, my right hand dog, and ran out to find a headless guinea still in the pen in the throws of death. That night I resolved to rewrap all the pens with an extra layer of chicken wire. I figured our nighttime bandit had had his meal for the evening and so would leave our poultry until morning. I was wrong.

The following morning, I was going through the normal chores of milking the goats, feeding the rabbits, and letting all the poultry out to forage for the day. I went into the chicken pen to see if any of the girls had laid that early in the day. I turned the corner and what I saw brought tears to my eyes and some seriously fowl language to my lips. Fernando. Fernando, our awesome rooster, was laying on the  floor of the pen without a head, white feathers everywhere. 

This was a heart breaking loss. Fernando was everything you could ask for in a rooster: attentive and protective of his ladies, calm and gentle with humans, dogs, and other birds. He was also beautiful. He was huge, easily 15lbs, with beautiful white plumage and a huge red comb. He was our first rooster and had fathered many chicks for us. 

At his point, I was spitting mad. I double wrapped every pen in chicken wire. I went to the feed store and bought a nasty looking trap. We locked up Hunter, our barn cat, for the night and put out the trap.

Unfortunately, we didn't catch anything, but the next morning we did see a big dead 'coon on the highway. We've had no more losses since Fernando, so maybe that was our culprit or maybe the extra layers of wire did the trick. Either way, deaths like these are always upsetting and hopefully we've seen the last of the nights of the headless poultry for a while. 

The survivors. 

The last turkey standing is our giant tom. The remaining guineas follow him around like a celebrity and his entourage. Every morning they precede him out of the pen and run around the corner to announce his coming with chorus of "CAH! CAH! CAH! CAH! CAH!" I've even seen them out there preening him, fussing over his chest and tail feathers like a stylist at a fashion shoot. Hilarious.

Compost

Another thing I've been trying to get around to is building us a proper compost area. When we moved here we moved with our trash can composter. Now that we have the space it was time to put together something more permanent.

The sheep have decided that they like to spend the night around the back side of the poultry pens. This has led to a buildup of ... fertilizer. I decided to rake and scoop this stuff up to include in the new compost heap.  (The turkey was not nearly as helpful with this as you'd think.)

So this is our new composting area. I used materials we had around the farm: old bits of fence material, cinder blocks, and a pallet from the feed store. It may not be very pretty, but hey, it's a pile of decomposing trash.  I made two separate areas so that we could add to one while the other did it's composting thing.

The actual pile is layers of old compost, grass clippings, manure, food scraps, and shredded paper. Today I watered the whole mess so hopefully it will be ready to put back into the garden someday soon.