Memorial Day Weekend Turkey Hatch...We have a hatch!! Pics Heavy

[Turkeyrangler]

Great hatch and pics!! I need an incubator like that. I see them for sale around here from time to time and I need to take the plunge and buy one. We'll see what happens tomorrow with mine, but I'm not very optimistic.

 

[Saltysteele]

they work great! i just need to find a turner that will fit in it (they'll fit side to side and front to back, the problem is the eggs sit to high. i highly recommend this type. even with the door open for a bit, the humidity and heat just keeps coming out.

Good luck on your hatch tomorrow! have they been moving in their shells?

 

[Turkeyrangler]

Well, two poults hatched right after I got home from work. Saw they were pipped when I left this morning. NO other pips yet, but I have at least two. They look healthy and are getting around pretty well in the hatcher.

 

[Saltysteele]

Awesome! How many do you have set to hatch this time?

I've got to say - this is the first couple of hatches we've done, but if we had not intervened, we would have had a lower hatch rate. with the turkeys, we started with 14 fertile eggs (took out 7 infertile early on). We lost one due to struggling when trying to get out, and one that never pipped, and must have died JUST before hatch time )fully formed, hadn't even attempted to pip the air cell. The chick that was off balance is fine now, and we just have one that now that has issues - he looks like Lurch, but seems to be improving. out of 14 fertile eggs, we got 12 chicks. out of 11 chicken eggs, we got 11 chickens.

we assisted 5 of the turkeys and 2 of the chickens. had we not, they would have cemented and died trying to get out. they had been zipped four a couple hours and were not progressing, you could see their down was drying inside the shell. their backs all had cement (which they've subsequently all removed from each other). upon removal from their shells, none had yolks outside their bodies.

obviously, we're not firm believers in "look but don't touch," and it has gotten us stellar results. i think if you monitor their progress, and they've gone 4-5 hours with no progression, you're pretty safe to help them out. others may disagree, but tell that to my 11 new chicks that running around and eating

you just have to be sure to keep that humidity up for those that haven't hatched, yet. every time we'd open it, we'd mist the heck out of it to boost humidity. it was never less than 70%, but a minute or two (we didn't just sit there with the door open)

good luck on your hatch!! hopefully this one will go better than the first!!

 

[gotta have my peeps!]

I am so glad to see more folks with heritage turkeys. I wish you the best of luck with your hatches!

I bought 15 Naragansett day-old poults in April 2010 and started them in a brooder (we lost one as a baby). When they came of age (when the six toms were beating each other to a pulp) I took all but one tom, plus two of the hens, to be butchered at a local farm. My husband and I have butchered chickens, but considering the extreme heat last summer and our lack of experience, we did not want to try our hand at the turkeys -- not yet. That left one tom, Mr. Blue, and six hens.

We got our first egg the day after Thanksgiving. Yummy! Production picked up slowly over the winter months. Their preference is to make nests on the ground next to trees close to the fence line -- not in the nice snug house we had just for that purpose. That's okay if we are collecting the eggs, but not if we want the hens to set, which we hoped would happen. In late March, one of our chicken hens, a white leghorn that wasn't getting along well with the rest of the flock, found her way into the turkey enclosure. She fit in fine and soon had a couple turkey hens following her around sharing the spoils of her scratching. The white taught some of the turkeys how to scratch for worms and such. The leghorn used the turkey's nesting house for her own eggs and the turkeys watched her with interest. A couple went in and inspected the hen's egg with great excitement. Well, they caught on and started laying their eggs in the house, thanks to that chicken.

One of the turkey hens started setting on the eggs in the nesting house. The others kept laying there and soon a second hen joined the first to set on the eggs. They didn't do the best job, there were a couple that pipped and were squashed, and some that did not develop and rotted, some that were not fertilized in the first place. But the two girls hatched out three poults. I brought the remaining eggs inside to an incubator, not sure if they had developed well enough to hatch. Two hatched; one was small and weak and the other had one leg that was more developed than the other -- it was pushing itself around in circles. I made a jolly-jumper, of sorts, to help its development for the first couple days. It worked; soon it could walk with both legs under it.

Right now, I have a baker's dozen turkey eggs we collected in an incubator due to hatch around June 11. And two of the other hens are setting on an outside nest. (Let them have their fun now that it has warmed up outside.)

Here are some pictures of the three poults being raised in the flock. They are just shy of a month old.

 

[Saltysteele]

Nice!

I've got 4 royal palm poults that are a couple months old, that we'll mix with our new chicks when they become of age. the friend of my dad's where we got his eggs from, just purchased a dozen from another person, and he wants to trade for one or two of mine. so, hopefully i'll have 3 different blood lines to get eggs from, and hopefully do well to propagate this species.

someday i'd like to get a couple of the Naragansetts, too, but one thing at a time

how big do they get? i thought they were just a couple pounds larger than the royal palms, but i was talking to someone today who thought they were quite a bit larger than the RP's

 

[gotta have my peeps!]

That sounds like the makings for a good gene pool. I wish you the best.

I haven't weighed our turkeys yet this year. The dressed weight of the six-month-old ones I had butchered last year was about 7.5 pounds for the hens and 17.5 pounds for the toms. I think they can get bigger. I'll try to weigh a couple live ones tomorrow. Tom doesn't like to be picked up -- it hurts his dignity. Maybe I can get him to step on the scale. lol

 

[Turkeyrangler]

I only had the two hatch, but I figured I would leave them a few more days and see what happened. I was just getting ready to throw out the eggs and noticed I had another one pipped so I may get one more.

 

[Saltysteele]

Sweet!

 

[Turkeyrangler]

The poult is out and appears to be doing OK. It's still getting it feet under itself but looks like it will make it (I hope). Tough little bugger to be this late and still be this strong. I did need to help it a bit because some of the membrane was dried out and really stuck to it's head. After I got that loose it did the rest.