After one drowned himself in a bucket, two were apparently pecked to death by their bored coop mates and three managed to escape the coop and never be seen again, we were down to just three. THREE FREAKING BIRDS out of 16. Suddenly the price per bird moved from an already troubling $7 to a hefty, unsustainable $37 per poult. Did I mention that was $37 per roughly four ounce bird? So wrong.
Having proved themselves relatively indestructible, I named the remaining three birds Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego and set them free to forage the farm. I am happy to report that the three little guys are still alive and well.
Turkey Lan (the original wedding turkey) and his once gimpy friend, Turkey Lean are also doing well. And growing nicely. And it seems - and I am about as sure as I get on the whole turkey-sexing thing - that we actually do have a matched pair. Turkey Lan looks properly dude-like and turkey lean has NO wattle or snood to speak of.
No idea on genders for the Black Spanish birds yet - they have not started to develop their sex characteristics. They are deliciously ugly little dinosaurs still. Here are a few recent photos. The first is Turkey Lan trying to get in on some tasty goat dinner.
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And here are a couple of the Black Spanish out on the prowl for delicious bugs.
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Wish us luck. If we have mixed sexes, we will let them breed and try to recapture some of our lost turkey dollars.
2 comments:
We've got 27 of the 30 turkeys still left- but they are only 3 weeks old so we have a lot of time to go.
At least you won't have a problem with them piling up on each other and trampling the bottom turkey-- that's another common turkey death scenario as the get larger - you don't have enough left for that to happen.
Thank you so much for providing the data you need, and thank you for sharing.
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