My neighbor and I are raising cornish x - they are about 4.5 to 5 weeks old. There are six BBW turkeys in with them that are a week younger. Last Sunday we moved them into a hoop coop in the pasture from a cattle tank in her barn. She was out of town and her daughter called me the other night because two of them were dead. It was dark but I could see that one had been chewed through the vent and into the abdominal cavity - there other didn't seem to have any bodily damage that I could see. I assumed (perhaps wrongly so) that they had dropped due to the heat and the others did what chickens do...
Tonight my neighbor came over to get me to look at a hole on another bird. I assumed again (wrongly so) that there was some severe feather pecking going on. But this bird has a hole in it's thigh that is well over an inch in diameter and could easily be that deep.
So I search for picking problems with meat birds and what I'm seeing is that these birds just don't exert that kind of energy. So my question is what could be eating our birds? I have a large coop right across the road from where this hoop coop is and the only predator problem I have had in 1.5 years is my own dumb dog. This coop has a two foot apron around it and there isn't any evidence of digging.
Thanks for your ideas.
Jenny
Tonight my neighbor came over to get me to look at a hole on another bird. I assumed again (wrongly so) that there was some severe feather pecking going on. But this bird has a hole in it's thigh that is well over an inch in diameter and could easily be that deep.
So I search for picking problems with meat birds and what I'm seeing is that these birds just don't exert that kind of energy. So my question is what could be eating our birds? I have a large coop right across the road from where this hoop coop is and the only predator problem I have had in 1.5 years is my own dumb dog. This coop has a two foot apron around it and there isn't any evidence of digging.
Thanks for your ideas.
Jenny
