Chicken graduation day
Aug. 13th, 2020 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trombonishFirst BIG batch of meat birds (46) for the Idaho Food Co-op went off to the processor this morning. That went all according to plan, no problems besides the usual blah of 5am is early. They definitely needed all 4 crates, some of them were VERY LARGE so 16 per crate would have been a bit iffy.
I continue to enjoy being The Experienced One at the drop-offs, where they know me by name and talk chicken shop. I was NOT the one with Crating Hijinks as one customer attempted to transfer chickens out of several cat carriers and boxes and into one of the processor's spare transport crates. Someone showed up with a livestock trailer, looking confused (they do process cows/pigs? But not on chicken mornings). Someone else brought 4 ENORMOUS turkeys in a great Dane cage, that I spent some time admiring. Maybe next year.
Then this evening I got the chicken tractor moved to a fresh part of the yard, and ready for the babies currently in the barn brooder to move up to. Chicken moving recommendations are to move them around dawn/dusk as they are less active then. To which, HAH. Moving the babies turned into a circus.
One major disadvantage the barn brooder (8'x6') has over the garage brooders (never more than like 4'x4') is how much harder it is to catch everyone! The first dozen were easy, as everyone mobbed me as I came in, but they quickly morphed into "FLEEEEEEEE THE BODY SNATCHER" as I tried to box them up. Additionally, I built the silly thing with a beam across the middle of it to hold their heat lamp, so I can't move that quickly between halves.
The second complication was one Russell Crowe.
First, a bit of backstory: after the unfortunate meeting of Jack Rooster and a shovel handle last year, I'd planned to get another rooster this year. We were gifted a barred rock cockerel in our first batch of chicks (initially Frankie, changed to Rocky after I kept mixing him up with Freddie). Unfortunately he got some sort of serious leg injury a couple weeks ago, and then up and died on us a couple days later. It's sad, but just one of those things that happens with chickens sometimes.
So, a friend of mine showed me to the local chicken Facebook group, where a post of "looking for a rooster, lots of single ladies" got a LOT of responses (and also my favorite joke of "Chicken Tinder"). It's the time of year when spring chickens either start laying or crowing, and there were a LOT of folks looking to re-home roosters. I picked out a GORGEOUS Ayam Cemani, from a lady who had no idea what he was (she said black Australorp, he is Not That). They are none too common of a breed, and I think he will make pretty babies, assuming we get that far.
So the main point of this story is, when I picked him up the lady informed me his name used to be Raven, but when they found out he was a rooster they changed it to Russell Crowe. Which is an AWESOME name for a rooster in general, and even better for a solid black one. Double pun!
Mr Crowe has been incarcerated in the baby brooder for his new-chicken isolation period (really he also should have been kept away from the babies as well, but I lacked an additional space, so in with the babies who have had least chance to catch anything they could give him seemed like the best choice). He is MUCH bigger than they are, of course, but he mostly just ignores them, and it was working for the couple days we had to put up with it.
However, when I started trying to catch the babies, general chicken panic was PLENTY contagious, and as I was working on the third dozen, Russell made a bid for freedom, a literal flying of the coop, if you will. His first jump took him up to the rim of the lid of the coop, about 3 ft up, but I wasn't too concerned because there were barn walls on 2 sides, me on one side, and the open lid 4 ft up and 4 ft over, that I assumed he couldn't fly. This part was actually pretty hilarious, as several of the babies saw what he had done and promptly tried to imitate him as an escape attempt. Baby meat birds, however, are not designed for flight (more like feathery softballs), so those that attempted mostly just crashed into the walls about 6 inches up.
Unfortunately Russell followed up on this with some spectacular air acrobatics to go up and over the lid that resulted in him clinging to the outside of the hinged lid mesh, partially upside-down, clearly using the few brain cells he posessed to realize he had no idea what to do next, surrounded by all this terrible freedom. I used the moment to catch him and give up on moving the rest of the babies tonight. I'll catch them in the morning.
For those that did get moved up to the chicken tractor, it is such an entertaining thing to watch them go from "augh what is grass" to instinct taking over and just being chickens. They discovered they could EAT the grass. They discovered there was a BUG in the grass! A bug that was too big to eat in one bite, requiring one to put it down to contemplate, whereupon a neighbor would grab it and run. Murderball ensued. They discovered that as long as we're eating everything, maybe we should try and see if the screws holding the pen together are food too! (Spoiler alert: they are not).
So all in all, chickens are idiots. But they sure are funny idiots.
I continue to enjoy being The Experienced One at the drop-offs, where they know me by name and talk chicken shop. I was NOT the one with Crating Hijinks as one customer attempted to transfer chickens out of several cat carriers and boxes and into one of the processor's spare transport crates. Someone showed up with a livestock trailer, looking confused (they do process cows/pigs? But not on chicken mornings). Someone else brought 4 ENORMOUS turkeys in a great Dane cage, that I spent some time admiring. Maybe next year.
Then this evening I got the chicken tractor moved to a fresh part of the yard, and ready for the babies currently in the barn brooder to move up to. Chicken moving recommendations are to move them around dawn/dusk as they are less active then. To which, HAH. Moving the babies turned into a circus.
One major disadvantage the barn brooder (8'x6') has over the garage brooders (never more than like 4'x4') is how much harder it is to catch everyone! The first dozen were easy, as everyone mobbed me as I came in, but they quickly morphed into "FLEEEEEEEE THE BODY SNATCHER" as I tried to box them up. Additionally, I built the silly thing with a beam across the middle of it to hold their heat lamp, so I can't move that quickly between halves.
The second complication was one Russell Crowe.
First, a bit of backstory: after the unfortunate meeting of Jack Rooster and a shovel handle last year, I'd planned to get another rooster this year. We were gifted a barred rock cockerel in our first batch of chicks (initially Frankie, changed to Rocky after I kept mixing him up with Freddie). Unfortunately he got some sort of serious leg injury a couple weeks ago, and then up and died on us a couple days later. It's sad, but just one of those things that happens with chickens sometimes.
So, a friend of mine showed me to the local chicken Facebook group, where a post of "looking for a rooster, lots of single ladies" got a LOT of responses (and also my favorite joke of "Chicken Tinder"). It's the time of year when spring chickens either start laying or crowing, and there were a LOT of folks looking to re-home roosters. I picked out a GORGEOUS Ayam Cemani, from a lady who had no idea what he was (she said black Australorp, he is Not That). They are none too common of a breed, and I think he will make pretty babies, assuming we get that far.
So the main point of this story is, when I picked him up the lady informed me his name used to be Raven, but when they found out he was a rooster they changed it to Russell Crowe. Which is an AWESOME name for a rooster in general, and even better for a solid black one. Double pun!
Mr Crowe has been incarcerated in the baby brooder for his new-chicken isolation period (really he also should have been kept away from the babies as well, but I lacked an additional space, so in with the babies who have had least chance to catch anything they could give him seemed like the best choice). He is MUCH bigger than they are, of course, but he mostly just ignores them, and it was working for the couple days we had to put up with it.
However, when I started trying to catch the babies, general chicken panic was PLENTY contagious, and as I was working on the third dozen, Russell made a bid for freedom, a literal flying of the coop, if you will. His first jump took him up to the rim of the lid of the coop, about 3 ft up, but I wasn't too concerned because there were barn walls on 2 sides, me on one side, and the open lid 4 ft up and 4 ft over, that I assumed he couldn't fly. This part was actually pretty hilarious, as several of the babies saw what he had done and promptly tried to imitate him as an escape attempt. Baby meat birds, however, are not designed for flight (more like feathery softballs), so those that attempted mostly just crashed into the walls about 6 inches up.
Unfortunately Russell followed up on this with some spectacular air acrobatics to go up and over the lid that resulted in him clinging to the outside of the hinged lid mesh, partially upside-down, clearly using the few brain cells he posessed to realize he had no idea what to do next, surrounded by all this terrible freedom. I used the moment to catch him and give up on moving the rest of the babies tonight. I'll catch them in the morning.
For those that did get moved up to the chicken tractor, it is such an entertaining thing to watch them go from "augh what is grass" to instinct taking over and just being chickens. They discovered they could EAT the grass. They discovered there was a BUG in the grass! A bug that was too big to eat in one bite, requiring one to put it down to contemplate, whereupon a neighbor would grab it and run. Murderball ensued. They discovered that as long as we're eating everything, maybe we should try and see if the screws holding the pen together are food too! (Spoiler alert: they are not).
So all in all, chickens are idiots. But they sure are funny idiots.