T-Day is here!

It's officially T-Day! That's right, Valerie has some new roommates. I picked up six turkey poults this morning. I now have three bourbon red and three blue slate/bourbon red mix turkey poults.



Here are Valerie and her friend Madelyn holding the little ones.



Now, that last batch of chicks that we hatched out of the incubator were just not handled at all. As a result, they are a little crazy and skittish. So, we're making sure to handle the turkeys. I have to confess, though, we are a little worried about getting too attached. We are definitely raising them for meat. Although, the hope is that I have at least one hen and one tom from the Bourbon Red set that we can keep to breed. The mixed breed ones are definitely headed for some feast down the road.

Here are some pix of Michael, Amira & I giving the littles a bit of warmth and mothering (or, fathering, in the case of Michael).







That said, the White Plymouth Rock cockrels we are raising for roasting are much friendlier than those mixed breed nutty chicks we hatched in Valerie's classroom. I really do spend more time than I should feeding them and talking to them and even picking them up. (They are so darn soft!) But, alas, 27 May is the date we have set for the slaughter. It will be a difficult day, but a delicious summer.



Back to that batch that hatched out of the incubator ... some people have requested recent photos. So, here they are:



Here you see the lot of them jammed up the corner of the "chicken tractor". We have a wind guard up behind them because we spoil them. They come into the garage under a light in a big old box at night. And they go out for "field trips" on nice days.



We have two little brown speckled birds with white chests. Here is one of them posing for the camera. They really are beautiful. I hope they are hens that will lay for us.





Above are another pair of our hatchlings. I believe the black-ish one is the one we helped hatch out of the olive egg. We are really hoping that is a hen, not a roaster! And the white one, if you look closely, is a turken. We had one white and one black turken hatch. We think this white one might be a hen because it is totally different from that strapping black lad.



Above you can see one of the turken chickens that hatched. We're pretty sure that broad chested, big footed, long tailed baldy is a cockrel.

On another note, we are speculating that the "bonus mystery chick" sent by McMurray's Hatchery with the Plymouth Rocks is a Modern Broad Breasted Red Game Hen. Here's a photo of her out in the yard:



Here's a picture from Backyardchicken.com:



And here's a drawing of one from the McMurray's site:



We narrowed it down to this breed after realizing they were sending one "exotic rare breed" from their catalog. Well, there were a lot of pictures we could rule out immediately. So, this is what we think we have. I'm hoping we can keep her as a layer. But she is really shy and not socialized at all. She doesn't flock with the chickens she's cooped up with now. And I'm not sure how she'll do if we stick her with others. Time will tell. But she is a cool looking bird.

So, for those keeping score, we have a total of 47 chickens and 6 turkeys, 2 rats, 1 cat, 1 rabbit, 3 kids and two adults to wrangle all that.

In the last bit of news, no B-day for me this week. Well, that is to say, "No Bee Day" for me this week. Turns out the bees won't be ready until the end of April. And that is, frankly, a good thing. I still have to plant the survivors (of my many attempts to destroy) in the greenhouse. Plus I have to run water to the various bramble patches and hedgerows I've placed throughout the yard. This place is so cool!