I took the day off, steeled my nerves, and processed my first birds ever today. Three male CXs were 8 weeks old and weighed 9lbs live so their time had come. They dressed out at 6.5lbs.
They seemed too big to fit in a bleach bottle cone so I cut a hole in the bottom of a 3 gallon peanut oil container, hung it from a tree and put them in that. It seemed to work fine. I used the neck slice method, trying to avoid the trachea. The first and 3rd birds went perfectly. The 2nd one I cut the trachea by accident. I guess that is the functional equivalent of an axe execution, so not the end of the world.
Having never killed anything that up close and personal I was pretty nervous. I didn't like doing it, but I am proud that I had the nerve to do it, and I kept my cookies down.
I was a little surprised at how little blood came out. I'd guess maybe a couple of cups? Hard to judge as it was running all over the tree trunk. I am posiitve I cut through the arteries though. There was nothing keeping the head on except the trachea and the spine.
By far the hardest part was separating the crop from the skin and breastmeat. That thing was stuck like glue. I was never quite sure if I'd gotten it all off. And that made the evisceration step harder because I was always tugging and messing around on both ends of the bird trying to get everything to come loose.
Each bird probably took me 2 hours to do from start to finish. I was doing it all alone (didn't want witnesses for my first try). The longest part was the plucking. The feathers came out pretty well. But going back with my thumb and knife to get out every last little embedded feather base was really tedious.
The gutting went OK too. Except I couldn't identify a mystery organ. Most of the organs are kind of self-contained. That is, they tend to come out whole. But there were two organs(?) near the tail end, up near the backbone, that were just kind of a squishy dark reddish brown. They were kind of last in line, after pulling out the lungs, then the testicles, there would be these squishy things last. What were they?
Time to relax. I am all wound up from the whole experience. And my back is killing me!
They seemed too big to fit in a bleach bottle cone so I cut a hole in the bottom of a 3 gallon peanut oil container, hung it from a tree and put them in that. It seemed to work fine. I used the neck slice method, trying to avoid the trachea. The first and 3rd birds went perfectly. The 2nd one I cut the trachea by accident. I guess that is the functional equivalent of an axe execution, so not the end of the world.
Having never killed anything that up close and personal I was pretty nervous. I didn't like doing it, but I am proud that I had the nerve to do it, and I kept my cookies down.
I was a little surprised at how little blood came out. I'd guess maybe a couple of cups? Hard to judge as it was running all over the tree trunk. I am posiitve I cut through the arteries though. There was nothing keeping the head on except the trachea and the spine.
By far the hardest part was separating the crop from the skin and breastmeat. That thing was stuck like glue. I was never quite sure if I'd gotten it all off. And that made the evisceration step harder because I was always tugging and messing around on both ends of the bird trying to get everything to come loose.
Each bird probably took me 2 hours to do from start to finish. I was doing it all alone (didn't want witnesses for my first try). The longest part was the plucking. The feathers came out pretty well. But going back with my thumb and knife to get out every last little embedded feather base was really tedious.
The gutting went OK too. Except I couldn't identify a mystery organ. Most of the organs are kind of self-contained. That is, they tend to come out whole. But there were two organs(?) near the tail end, up near the backbone, that were just kind of a squishy dark reddish brown. They were kind of last in line, after pulling out the lungs, then the testicles, there would be these squishy things last. What were they?
Time to relax. I am all wound up from the whole experience. And my back is killing me!
