Butchered 4 roosters; unexpected adventures

So, had some pretty interesting although catastrophic adventures yesterday.

It was a nice day, I thought "OK this one reader person has asked for photos of the butcher process, I'm feeling OK, & I need to stop putting this off... let's get this done."  Got all the stuff around for it, started boiling the water, and headed for the barn to catch the intended "victims".  I think they must have sensed that their time had come because although I was able to catch 2 of the 4, the other 2 evaded me to the very end, even after using my pistol to try to take them out.  Finally, I thought "Fine, I'll just do these two, maybe I can catch the other two later after I've gotten these done...", however in the meantime I handed my dad my pistol (because I got frustrated and fed up chasing birds..) and even my dad got fed up. 

While Dad was chasing down the other two, I got my gloves and went for the kill cage (an old dog crate used to isolate them until they are ready for death) to catch a roo.  There were two in there, both were larger than I normally like to butcher, both with long long spurs, but I thought this would be to my advantage for an easier time cleaning them.  It was not.  These two big roosters ganged up on me and rushed me at the door as I went for them, both flapping their wings, attacking my head and face.  I got spurred in the arms, chest and back as I ducked from their barrage attack.

After that, I was 100% done with messing around on a humane kill business.  And of course by not doing a humane kill it wouldn't be clean either, so I knew I wouldn't be able to get photos.  But regardless, I needed these birds gone, so I turned my husband, dad & brother loose on them.  Told them to take them out however they wanted as long as they were dead.  The three men thought this was an awesome idea, since they all hate my chickens, but specifically my roosters with a passion.

After locating them all, they were successful, but there was one rooster in particular that was very good at evading us, even though we shot at him he would keep running.  Once we finally did take him out and I took all his feathers off I realized that we had all hit him when we were shooting him, he just had like... 9 lives. lol  The other three roosters went down a lot easier.

However, interesting facts (to me anyway) was that when I tried to shoot the escape artist rooster several months ago, I thought I missed him, I did not.  I did indeed hit him, and not only that but I hit him exactly where I was supposed to to take him out.  I had just missed his internal organs by mere millimeters. When I finally opened him up, he had 5 bullet holes, (4, 9mm & 1, .22) plus the healed hole from my original 9mm several months back.  Tough old bird was way too good at staying alive!! 

After all of that, I ended up only getting one bird that was usable out of the 4, mainly because I was just so tired I couldn't finish.  My hands were shaking and I was close to collapsing, ended up nicking the gall bladder on the last one I attempted which means I had to throw it away.  Asked my brother to take care of all of the guts, feathers, carcasses etc. which he did, while I showered, then colapsed.  Mom even texted me that she needed me to help her, with my kids, and I didn't even hear my phone.  THAT showed me this morning just how utterly exhausted I was.  

As The Egg Turns

Good morning blogger world!

My husband says I need to share a story with you about the personalities my hens have developed. There are a few details necessary to describe the comical behaviors that have transpired.

Sometime during the winter months, I got sick of feeding the birds.  I had just had a baby in April of 2015, & felt like I was running around with my hair on fire trying to get everything done for my children, let alone the birds.  I asked for some help from my sister, who did help for a time but got bored of it, stopped feeding them & didn't tell me.  The chickens went for about a week without food, and as most animals will do when they are being starved, they will try to escape their confinement.  Mine succeeded.

They succeeded so well in fact, that they ripped the chicken wire up from the floor boards in specific areas & created new nesting areas for themselves between the wire & the exterior walls. So even though they escaped, they would return to these areas and lay their eggs behind the wire where humans and most animals couldn't get to them.  I was actually quite impressed, after I got over the irritation of realizing they had ruined the coop and that I couldn't reach their eggs.

Over the last several months I have slowly re-trained them where I want them to lay.  The birds & I have come to a compromise after several go rounds of them vandalizing the chicken coops.  I won't lock them up, as long as they lay their eggs where I want them to.  This compromise works well for us, the birds are able to go forage for themselves & I don't have to feed them on such a concrete schedule.  In exchange for their freedoms, I have trained them to lay their eggs in 1 of 2 places, and of course there is always that 1 bird that must be contrary and still tries to lay her eggs where she wants and not where I would like. 1 out of 14 is not too bad though so I let her slide.

The places I have coached them into laying in are:

• An old water tank that no longer does it's intended job correctly.  I have filled this tank approximately 1/2 full with hay and "seeded" the nests with fake eggs to guide the birds towards laying there.  
• The tank is large enough for all of my hens to fit in side without touching while laying at the same time if they chose 
• The walls of the tank are tall enough that our German shepherd cannot reach the eggs to hand them down to the yellow mutt.
• I've placed boards over the top of the tank except in key places to discourage scavengers such as raccoons, opossums, skunks & other chickens from raiding the nests.

• An old white plastic milk house sink, stuffed with hay about half-way up & fake eggs seeding the nest.  This location has been placed inside of the second hen house with the door closed and the walls re-secured on the first hen house that they all destroyed so they had to find new spots to lay. 

Both locations work really well. Both locations are too tall for the yellow mutt to get at the eggs (she is my egg sucker) and although the shepherd could reach the eggs in the 2nd hen house, he doesn't because he and I have had a few "talks" about such behavior, including some not so veiled threads of life on a rope if he doesn't behave.

What I have actually found interestingly enough, is that I have 7 who prefer the white sink, and will lay all of their eggs at the same time.  4 of them will sit down facing each other so their butts are in the corners, and chitter chat at each other.  It's almost like they are sitting there gossiping and talking about each other.  "Oh my GOSH!!! Did you see how ruffled Stella was after Foghorn got done with her?  Oh!  He's such an animal!  I wish Heidi would butcher him and get it over with!  The way he uses those spurs on us while breeding is just INHUMANE!"  bahaha.

Then you have the other half of the flock, who prefers to do their laying in private.  And I mean as private as it gets.  They all lay their eggs separately, under cover of darkness (under the boards) & no one talks to each other.  They will wait in line to use the water tank, but no one jumps up early to watch, and if I happen to walk in during one of them laying, it offends her so much she will not lay her egg that day, or if she does, it isn't until LONG after I've gone.  If someone starts pinching, they will fall back on the 55-gallon trash barrels I have throughout the barn.  Their preferred ones are those with paper feed sacks in the bottom, but really it just comes down to whether they need the extra over-flow nests or not.

When I chose to purchase chickens, I had no idea there would be so many personalities and temperaments involved!!  It's like a tiny soap opera down there in the barn!  A friend of the family laughed and suggested I call the chicken drama "As the egg turns", and it probably isn't a bad idea, but I'm not sure anyone would actually get as much of a kick out of the chicken drama as I do.

The goings on in our world over the last week

SURPRISE rex bunnies!

Lacey

Rusty

Lightning

Roger

Roger being roger.  Very cocky, very strutty

Buff Orpington Rooster - also for sale if anyone is interested, although he will be a stew pot guest if no one is.

One of the 4 red pyle old english roosters for sale

Spazzy, being very photogenic

Larry, being cocky.

Ms. Bunny's rex had another surprise litter.  9 of them this time! 

The beeplas playing & scratching under the elderberry's

Letting the Beeplas free-range for the first time

The beeplas are officially free-ranging!  Yay! 

Yesterday my sister did chores for me because I was busy trying to put Little Frog down for his mid-morning nap.  He did eventually go down, but not before my sister opened up the coop door and let EVERYONE out to free-range.  She didn't know I had only been letting a handful out at a time so they would slowly get used to being "free" to roam...either way, they are all free now!

It went so well yesterday that I let them all loose again today, and boy oh boy were they EXCITED LOL!!!  They were running so fast when they were leaving the coop that they were running over each other and going head over apple cart!  LOL  It was so funny.   :-D

Between my husbands bantams (10), my beeplas (25), and moms adults (6)... we have a very busy little chicken farm!!  LOL   Chickens chickens everywhere!

In other news, it looks like I have no less than 5 roosters right now,  not counting my husbands.  Gah! 

First attempt at chicken mash of sorts

My husband has 4 roosters & a hen he intends me to butcher out.  They are all bantams, and since I have zero experience butchering chickens out as of yet, Daddy Frog is saying that working these out will be good experience for me, because even if it doesn't work out and I totally screw them up, that by the time I get through all 5 I should have some idea of how to do it correctly when I try to do it on the adults!  :-)

Anyway, these 5 bantams love to waste TONS of food.  I got sick & tired of it.  They are costing me money (because they are in a rabbit cage and keep beaking their food out of the feeder, allowing it to fall through the cage floor to the ground below.  The guineas clean up after them, but the whole purpose in keeping these birds alive in the first place was to fatten them up.. and all of the "fat food" (meat bird food) keeps getting kicked out and they're only getting part of it... so aggravating!!  So, I poured water all over it and crammed their feeder full!  It worked!!  :-D  Yay!!

It worked with them, so then I did the same thing with my beeplas, and it worked even better with them!  I think this may be the way I feed them from now on!  I am so stoked!!

I've been buying 50# of feed every two weeks (32 birds eat a lot...who'd have thought?), then combining it with the free cast off (straw, cracked wheat, buckwheat hulls, corn shells etc) from the mill, and the corn meal unsuitable for  human consumption, also from the mill.  The chickens love it, but there is a lot of waste when this mixture gets put into the feeders.  This mash idea... this could really work.  It is A LOT messier for me, because I don't have a system down yet, but so far there has been no waste, and the beeplas seemed to be able to eat it a lot easier.  What with the food having been partially softened with the water and so forth. :-)

Photos of the beeplas in the adult coop @ age 5-weeks 4-days; Dads honey bee's and a bunny

This is an adult female rex my sister would like to sell.  

She has too many rabbits and needs to downsize a few of them.

I've dubbed this rooster "Rusty".  He is an Easter Egger (Americauna) and it's going to be so fun to see just how he turns out because even right now he's a really pretty boy.

I've dubbed this rooster "Rusty".  He is an Easter Egger (Americauna) and it's going to be so fun to see just how he turns out because even right now he's a really pretty boy.

One of my Light Brahma Hens

The adults aren't "thrilled" with having the newbies, but they aren't "unhappy" either, nor are they fighting with the littles. :-)

The adults aren't "thrilled" with having the newbies, but they aren't "unhappy" either, nor are they fighting with the littles. :-)

Dads new "toys"... he's not obsessing about his honey bee's at all... ha!

Dads new "toys"... he's not obsessing about his honey bee's at all... ha!

Throw together chicken tractor

When I bought the first 13 chickens through mypetchicken.com I wasn't worried about integrating them into the existing flock, or any of the stuff I probably should have been.  It was only 13 of them after all...  Then of course I went to TSC and found all those Easter Eggers (11) & Buff Orpingtons (2), bringing my grand total up to 26 at that point and making my job between weeks 4 & 6 much more difficult of course.

I've realized since they rolled over into week 4 that the stock tank they've been living in, is just too small for them to exist in during the day... The time has now come for me to think about a way for them to go outside without getting loose (their not all "tame" to my liking, and will not free range until I can be sure they will remain "home" and not  wander off).

I think considering the gentle nature of the ISA Browns I have right now that I could put them into the adult coop if I wanted to, but I'm not 100% convinced they are ready yet.  They are only 4-weeks old after all... Not to mention I wanted to use up all of the adult layer feed prior to integration into the flock so I don't need to be concerned about the beepla's getting too much calcium and damaging their kidneys in the process. 

There were some hog panels laying around, some chicken wire, some baling twine, some ice cream pails for water... so after working really hard on Monday, this is the resulting contraption.  The beepla's go back into the stock tank at night (handling each and every chick in the process, thereby taming them a little more every day) and they go out into the yard and garden during the day to learn to scratch for bugs and worms, dust bath etc.

The first day, they were all terrified to even move.  They huddled up into a big pile and wouldn't do much of anything.  It was rather discouraging... but then the second day, they did better, and were less wild when I went to put them into their box to come outside.  The third day (today) they had become so accostomed to the idea that when the "tall noisy lady" comes that they go outside that 3 of them jumped into my hand when I put it on the ground to catch them!  Yay!!  THEN as if that wasn't exciting enough... one of my prized Light Brahma's caught her first worm!  All by herself!!  OMG I was so proud I came inside and told my mom & sister!  They laughed at me and didn't understand but I was so proud!  :-D

So anyway... I've done this system the last 3-days, and although it does not look pretty, it works really really well for our needs.

Its amazing what two hog panels, some chicken wire, baling twine, small pails and ingenuity can accomplish...

Photos of Daddy Frog's new chickens

**  All of these chickens are rescues.  They were being kept all together and were feather picking each other etc. 

This is the male Mille Fleur d'Uccle that we hadn't planned on getting, but Daddy Frog has decided that he likes him because he's a highly neurotic chicken.   He's been dubbed "Spaz"

 We believe this to be a female Porcelain d'Uccle?  ... but we're not sure of the gender because it's so feather picked that it's hard to tell right now.  When it was placed into a "private" cage it collapsed from exhaustion and stress.  It's been fed 3 extra rations of high protein feed and now, 24 hours later, it's doing MUCH better.

One of the three Silver Duckwing Roosters.  Daddy Frog is thinking of keeping at least one... possibly all of them, we'll see.

The Silver Sebright hen.  We are not going to keep her, either butchering her or re-homing!  I can fix the splay beak, but it's a genetic defect due to inbreeding, so she isn't a good candidate for my husband's planned breeding program. 

We do not know what breed this is but we have 4 of them!  They are available to be re-homed!!  

 Silver Duckwing Rooster!  We have 3, 2 are possibly up for re-homing!

Daddy Frog's prized Golden Sebright rooster.  He has named him Larry, and he is a very cocky little guy LOL.  He and I have already had to have a chat about who is going to be the top rooster and who is the submissive one. 

 "Look at me!  Aren't I pretty!?"

Larry has been properly reminded who will be top roo.  Obviously he is humiliated. LOL