This past weekend, we moved forty Bronze turkeys, eighty-odd laying hens, and two roosters (I repeatedly request that the loud black and white one be turned into stew) to the youngstock barn. The watering bowls are freezing and the grass is dying off, making the area around the coops a muddy mess; it's hard to get up the ramp to collect chicken eggs or fill the feeder because we slip off the cleats this time of year. It's also less hassle rounding up turkeys from an indoor pen, rather than having to chase them around the yard on processing morning.
Within days, three turkey hens were attacked by their coop-mates. Two have died. This is something that has never happened before - at least, not when they are located inside. When they are younger and turn on one of their own (outdoors), we move the injured bird to the "spare coop", let it recover, then re-introduce it to the main pen a week or so later - a method that has always been successful.
Bird-on-bird hate this time in their lives is something new, or as my husband Dan says, "Nothing is ever easy". I've stopped offering turkeys to reserve some unsold in case of further incidents - but if more are harassed in the next few weeks, I'll be eyeing up that rooster again, and selling my own T-bird for holiday spending money.
Conversely, the year-old laying hens are happy being inside (they were raised here), though one of the quail-size bantams squeezed out during transport of the mobile coop from the pasture to the barn. It flew high overhead and was last seen booking toward the neighbor's garden. Hasn't come back.
Dan and our friend Myron Collins found time on Saturday to show yet another person how to process their own white-feathered meat birds.
We are asked to process chickens for others all the time, but can't -it takes longer to set up and tear down the equipment than to bag and tag a small flock; we don't have ready labor, and taking care of our own birds a couple times a year is all the extra work we want to do.
But who can blame a person for putting on a few Cornish hens these days to try and save some money? Or turkeys, ducks, even Guinea fowl? You control what the birds eat, the conditions they are raised in, and the results taste better than what's found in the supermarkets. (Though, it is hard to beat a roasted Maple Leaf Farms Pekin duck). That's why we started raising birds, so many years ago that Dan and I can't agree on when we started doing it, or which bird we bought first.
There certainly seems to be potential for some small flock-owners to band together, invest in the necessary pluckers and scalders, and pass the equipment around as needed. Teach a man to fish - or to kill a chicken - that's really all we can do here.
