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[capper2013]

Well your geese are smart....they know that your chicken is really a dinosaur in disguise , lol.

Yes, some say you shouldn't raise chickens and turkeys together but I do because there seem to be more benefits than problems. There is a disease called black spot that Turkeys can get from chickens. If you don't treat the turkeys they may die from it. My conclusion...treat the black spot if it appears. We have seven acres and our chickens are all free range. Currently I am training my Turkeys to be free range as well. They are not as quick to learn where their roost is and will just huddle together where ever they may be when the sun goes down and the mood strikes them.

Now about the benefits.....apparently Turkey chicks are a little stupid and can starve to death if someone doesn't teach them to eat or drink. So unless you want to be the teacher, you can incubate a couple of chicken eggs along with them and they will solve the problem for you..... and yes, chickens incubate at the same temperature but they need one week less incubation time....so throw in the chick eggs into the Bator a week after you started your turkeys. Chicks come out of the egg, pecking and scratching and the Turkey chicks learn very quickly from them.

I learned even more beneficial information from @Momo . She had a very interesting response to a post on chicken vaccinations. Apparently Mareks disease is everywhere but the recommendation was that vaccinations were only necessary for large chicken producers. Check out her post because it was very informative. From it I gleaned that some people raise Turkeys and Chickens together so that they don't have to vaccinate against Mareks. Apparently Turkeys carry a milder form of Mareks that will confer some immunity to chickens for the killer disease. I don't really know the validity of this info but I have found that the people in this forum are very wise and speak from years of experience.

Hope this was helpful @capper2013

when the geese are ready to go home to their goosey house they come and knock on the door. it used to be just the back door, but now they are a bit bigger they jump up the steps to the front door and bash away at that. as soon as the door is opened then they charge inside and call the others if they are alone.
they know it's where I keep their chick crumb, I always give them a box full when they go home because they just love it. if they can get to it before getting home then they are like a school of piranha fish with a lump of meat.
I am not so keen on the mess from the chick crumb. the waste is quite stinky in comparison to grasses, it also looks like soggy oatmeal, whereas the grass waste is more like a firm pesto.
thing is, you could almost set your watch by them. they seem to like going home around the same time every evening.
today I was replacing the sawdust in their nesting boxes around home time, so they gave up knocking on the door and came looking for me. when they found me I got a good goosey telling off until they saw their chick crumb box and zoomed inside to wait for their feast.
the chicken, on the other hand, jumps up on the front window sill and pecks at the window when it is getting dark. she behaves very much like a mini dinosaur, so much so that she puts me in mind of the raptors in Jurassic park when she stalks the geese.
I have read somewhere that they are the closest living relative to T-rex.

I am thinking that I might get some turkeys next year and see how they fare living with the geese. their house is a lot bigger than the chicken one and they seem far more placid.

@capper2013 by far the best thing about turkey chicks is that they don't peck each other like chickens from different hatches do. Since I started with just one turkey hen, I have several different hatches because you can't keep the eggs too long. All of my hatches live together after the first month. Some are only a month old and some are three months old. You could never do that with chickens because the older, bigger ones would peck the little ones to death if they couldn't get away.

I hope I am not breaking some Turkey rule by doing that but I really can't have a separate house for just five Turkeys. I had been saving the eggs for two weeks but I found that the longer I kept the eggs the fewer hatched. Now I use two incubators and I put the turkey eggs into my main Bator every week making sure to mark each weeks eggs with a different symbol. Then on lockdown, I remove the eggs that are 25 days old to my other Bator. By the time they are hatched I have just enough time to clean it and put the next group in for lock down. You really have to watch your calendar doing this.....Next year will be better because I plan to keep all my turkey hens.

The little Toms have started to "display".....they puff themselves up and strut their stuff for the girls.....it's hilarious to watch. Apparently "size" doesn't matter in Turkeys because I have a two months old Tom that bites the crap out of a three months old Tom who is twice as big as him (my boys don't seem to peck each other but they will grab the flesh at the neck and hang on, lol). Nobody ever draws blood at this age but I am betting that at some point I am going to have to separate them as they get bigger.

I think turkeys are my second favourite birds, just behind geese. not a lot in it, just that geese are multi-purpose; in that they work as guard animals too. turkeys just look stunning in a kind of pre-historic manner. the more I read your posts, the more I want some turkeys!
I like your double bator method, seems a very sensible idea. what are the laying rates like? do they produce many eggs?

I water tested the eggs last night, I have one definite live wriggler, four other potentials that didn't wriggle and five that sank.
the incubator doesn't smell like it has done with previous hatchings of chickens and my geese, I guess that can only be a good thing.
they are due to start coming out on Monday, so we will see then what promising gifts we get.
all this talk of getting little critters is making me impatient... I want my babies now!!! not long to go though...

 

[IceAngel]

Quote: Hopefully they will hatch on time or a day late. Since you don't have many eggs, really monitor the peeping. If you don't hear any and don't have any sign of pipping, you should open the shell very carefully at the wide end of the egg. If the membrane is white then the chick is still alive, if it is brown then it is dead.

Because your chicks experienced low temperatures they may be too weak to zip on their own. Read the posts on helping them hatch, I found them very useful. Hopefully somewhere there is a pip hole....that means they are breathing air. Apparently breathing air triggers a number of important functions....one of them being the closing off of veins. My chicks that survived had a pip hole but couldn't zip and stopped peeping - probably from fatigue. I peeled away only enough of the membrane so that I could see where their beaks were. Then I wrapped them in warm wet paper towels, making sure no fluids could drip onto their nostrils and put them back in the Bator. Next day if they hadn't made any progress getting out of their shell, I made a zip line for them but I didn't penetrate their membrane. It took one of them three days to get out. Some people have mentioned that chicks that don't zip on their own are weak and it's Nature's way of culling them. I haven't found that in my survivors. They are all active and look healthy and eating well.

My Tom and Hen are Rigley Bronze. The Hen started laying every other day in April but is now laying three days in a row, so I get about five eggs a week. I can't wait until next year when I hope to have enough eggs from all the Hens I keep, to do a Bator full each week. (I think I told you that hatch rate goes down after eggs are a week old.) This is Heathcliff my Tom. He is one year old. Gertrude, his gal, is not as showy and quite a bit smaller.

 

[IceAngel]

when the geese are ready to go home to their goosey house they come and knock on the door. it used to be just the back door, but now they are a bit bigger they jump up the steps to the front door and bash away at that. as soon as the door is opened then they charge inside and call the others if they are alone.

This is too funny, lol. Now I want geese too. Have you ever raised ducks? Would geese and ducks get along? Which one is better eating?

If your gooseys don't want to share their house you might advertise for an old camper. Here in Canada it costs a lot of money to dispose of them at the refuse dump so people will give them away free. Here is my first chicken house. The camper is up on blocks so the chickens have dug dirt holes underneath where it's shady. In the winter time it's a snow free area where I can throw their feed.

 

[capper2013]

oh my gosh! he is absolutely stunning.
that is what I call a real turkey. there are lots of pretenders on the block but that one is truly the real macoy.
that is the sort I want. their heads look so pre-historic, like a little feathery monster.

with regard to the campers, over here they are not in great abundance. people tend to look after them quite well as they are a bit of a fashion accessory at the moment.
we don't really have those giant ones like houses on wheels, there is the odd one or two that people have imported as a status symbol but generally it tends to be the old volkswagon models from the 60's and 70's that people go for and they fetch quite a lot of money. awesome idea for a coop though.
I built my goose house out of old doors. they are all hardwood except for one with lots of glass panels in it, which I turned on it's side to give them a big window to see out of.
predators here are pretty much foxes and that is about it. because of where we live there is no threat from dogs (unless one escapes and runs away for about 6 miles), so the geese have a fairly large house, but I open it up each day and they roam our 5 acres; although they generally only stay around the house, the driveway and the top of one of our fields.

I checked out the eggs this morning in a float test. only one moving, so that went back in the bator. I then checked all the others starting with the sinkers; breaking open the air sac end. absolutely none of them had even taken. they were all still raw eggs.
I was a little dubious as to the age of them when we bought them, as we had too many for the incubator so I cooked a couple up for my daughter. they seemed quite watery, suggesting they weren't the freshest collection.

they were worth a shot as they were from our nearest neighbour and only a couple of pounds for 12. so it's not like we broke the bank getting them.
having spoken to them recently, they have tried without success to hatch using a broody hen.
so I guess one of their hens is fertile at least, but I am not sure they were selling the best quality product.
there are a few people selling eggs in our locale, we will probably try someone else next. I am hoping to get a cockerel from the live egg. it will be good company for "bully" our resident chicken.

the knocking on the door is quite amusing, however what is even funnier is that Mr Nebbercracker (our largest goose) gets quite moody if you laugh at him. if he can get to you he will grab your lip and give it a good tug. my daughter had him on her lap and laughed at a strange noise he made, so he gave her the lip tug; I found it hilarious and laughed so he came over and tugged my lip too. obviously not to be encouraged but it really is rather funny.
other than that he is very chilled out. nothing really phases him.
the only bad side to geese that I can see is the mess. they just do their business wherever they happen to be, standing or sitting it makes no difference they just let it all go; be that in their bed, on your lap, on each other, it really doesn't matter to them.
if they are fed on grasses and other greenery then it's not too bad, it's like a firm green pesto sauce that isn't really that smelly. however on chick crumb they absolutely stink, and it comes out like some kind of nasty oatmeal. but they love it. they get extremely ravenous when faced with a box of crumb every evening.

 

[IceAngel]

Sorry @capper2013 my turkey is a Ridley Bronze.......not Rigley.

I wouldn't buy eggs if I were you. Bring your Hen over to your neighbours for a rendezvous with their cockrel if they will let you. Apparently hens retain sperm and it can fertilize their eggs for a week. With one Hen it's not really worth buying your own boy, however, your neighbour might worry about your hen bringing pathogens to his yard, so you might not have a choice. The problem with just one Hen means that the boy will be related to everything you can hatch. I get a new male for the Hens I keep.

The housey made of old doors is a really good idea. I recycle everything too. Do they have "pallets" in the UK? You may know them under a different name....it's the base that forklifts pick up in warehouses. When heavy merchandise is delivered to stores the pallets are left behind and are free for the taking here. They slats are hardwood. I made this little house for my chicks after they come out of the brooder. It's just two pallets that I nailed together. I put some tin along the peak and surrounded it with a moveable wire fence-mesh fence and cover everything with a net (because we have eagles, red tailed hawks and huge grey owls). I stick rebar through the slats for roosts.

 

[capper2013]

Sorry @capper2013 my turkey is a Ridley Bronze.......not Rigley.

I wouldn't buy eggs if I were you. Bring your Hen over to your neighbours for a rendezvous with their cockrel if they will let you. Apparently hens retain sperm and it can fertilize their eggs for a week. With one Hen it's not really worth buying your own boy, however, your neighbour might worry about your hen bringing pathogens to his yard, so you might not have a choice. The problem with just one Hen means that the boy will be related to everything you can hatch. I get a new male for the Hens I keep.

The housey made of old doors is a really good idea. I recycle everything too. Do they have "pallets" in the UK? You may know them under a different name....it's the base that forklifts pick up in warehouses. When heavy merchandise is delivered to stores the pallets are left behind and are free for the taking here. They slats are hardwood. I made this little house for my chicks after they come out of the brooder. It's just two pallets that I nailed together. I put some tin along the peak and surrounded it with a moveable wire fence-mesh fence and cover everything with a net (because we have eagles, red tailed hawks and huge grey owls). I stick rebar through the slats for roosts.

the neighbours have single hens with single cockerels (dunno why, they are a little odd), I wouldn't want to mix my hen with their birds, I don't know how well looked after they are with regard to immunisations and parasites etc. I wouldn't want to contaminate my birds with someone else's. if I hatch from eggs then I know they are safe, I have not heard of anything that can get passed on from parents to embryos. my plan is to hatch from different sources and regularly change the cockerel if i plan on hatching my own in the future.
bully is not laying yet anyway, she only hatched at easter. we did have more than one, but a certain nameless little 4 year old lady gave the chicks her sweets to be nice, but in doing so infected their crops with all the sugary goodness and killed them. bully was the only one who survived because she was being played with elsewhere.
the eventual aim is to be self sufficient in meat and eggs from hens. I did plan to do that with the geese but they are just far too gorgeous to kill.

we do have pallets here, half the goose house floor is made from a giant pallet with bathroom grade waterproof floor boards. the other half is a concrete block wall that fell down and didn't break apart. the floor space totals around 20ft by 6ft, so there is enough room for our 3 geese with plenty of room to hatch some more.

I like the idea of the pallet starter home. I think I could use that idea here, although I would have to fill in the gaps as the uk didn't become so green by having brilliant sunshine all the time.
for the chicks we have bird predators too, buzards, kites and owls all patrol our land. we generally keep chicks indoors until they have full feathers.
I think if we put the chicks out then we would be dealing with rodents and other mammals like minks, stoats and weasels too. so once they are big enough not to be carried away we only really have to contend with foxes and possibly badgers if they eat live stock (I am not sure whether they do or not). seeing as I have had neither eat through a door to get in our house, I figured they'd make pretty solid house walls.

 

[capper2013]

Have you ever raised ducks? Would geese and ducks get along? Which one is better eating?

no, I haven't raised ducks yet, however most waterfowl get on pretty well. it's best not to mix the more dominant geese with the more passive ducks as they will get beaten up. so call ducks and Chinese geese would probably be a big no no.
I would probably avoid mixing timid ducks with any of the big geese too. but in general they are pretty safe together. obviously one cannot account for individual personalities as some Chinese geese will be pussy cats and some call ducks could be feisty, however, geese are really strong animals and should they take a disliking to the ducks then they will lose a lot of feathers and have extremely sore heads from all the biting.
can't really call it pecking with geese as their beaks are pretty broad, even at a coupe of months old our geese will give a nasty pinch if they catch you wrong when they groom you.

as for eating, both are real tasty. ducks have less meat on them, geese have a higher fat content (great for roasted potatoes). duck meat is generally a bit darker in colour too. given the preference before keeping geese I would have slightly preferred goose over duck to eat, not by a lot but it would have the edge. however now, I am not so certain I could eat a goose knowing how much personality they have. it sounds odd but they are like little feathered people. they are very unlike chickens when it comes to personality, it's difficult to explain without sounding weird, but I think you will find most goose keepers would concur.

 

[IceAngel]

Gack!!! I replied to this but then it disappeared. I totally understand what you mean about personalities. I can't kill Heathcliff, he and I are buddies, but he will be gone by Thanksgiving. Apparently Turkey Hens stop laying in fall (at least in the very Northern climes). Furthermore, fertility goes down by the second year for Toms (probably because of their weight). Since he fathered all my poulets there is no point in keeping him.

Interestingly enough I have no qualms about giving chickens the axe. Last year I had this very brave, one month old chick that wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side of the chicken wire. Before I saw that he had escaped, all the bigger chickens had pecked every inch of scalp off his head. When he was too exhausted to run he just stood there and took the beating. If ever I feel remorse about killing a chicken I think of Tiny Tim.

By the way what do you think of my new Avatar? I posted this when things got a little peckish in another forum, lol. Not everyone sees the irony, lol.

 

[capper2013]

Gack!!! I replied to this but then it disappeared. I totally understand what you mean about personalities. I can't kill Heathcliff, he and I are buddies, but he will be gone by Thanksgiving. Apparently Turkey Hens stop laying in fall (at least in the very Northern climes). Furthermore, fertility goes down by the second year for Toms (probably because of their weight). Since he fathered all my poulets there is no point in keeping him.

Interestingly enough I have no qualms about giving chickens the axe. Last year I had this very brave, one month old chick that wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side of the chicken wire. Before I saw that he had escaped, all the bigger chickens had pecked every inch of scalp off his head. When he was too exhausted to run he just stood there and took the beating. If ever I feel remorse about killing a chicken I think of Tiny Tim.

By the way what do you think of my new Avatar? I posted this when things got a little peckish in another forum, lol. Not everyone sees the irony, lol.

I figured i'd post you a pic of the new edition.
it arrived about 8ish this morning.
once it learned how to read I showed it your post, it thought your dog looked hilarious even though it seemed a little unimpressed with it's new hat.
"tiny" (that's it's name) asked if you could make a hat for them too. that would be totally off the wall, a chicken with a chicken hat on.
the chick really is tiny, I have never seen anything quite as small as this one before.
I have no idea what it is, maybe some kind of bantam, although the neighbour didn't think she gave us any bantam eggs.
the egg wasn't particularly small either.
it was introduced to the geese and bully today. bully pecked it, Ronnie (the female goose) put it's whole head in her mouth. but the two boys, Mr Nebbercracker and Reggie, both groomed it and allowed it to snuggle up in their big fluffy feathers.
it has a voice bigger than it's body too. it cheeps so very loudly.
it feels so fragile to hold, but it is certainly learning it's way around.
it seems to have imprinted on my daughter, which is kind of nice as the geese imprinted on me and see me as their mum.

some people on here get quite feisty, I tend not to get involved. letting anger out over the cyberwaves is never a good thing, it kind of exposes ones dirty laundry worldwide which could never be positive move.

 

[IceAngel]

You are one nifty chick. I see that you still move your lips when you read. That will go away with practice, lol.