Pennsylvania!! Unite!!

[LittleMissPurdy]

I agree with the others, even with my limited knowledge. Sorry!
I think I have won this battle, I timed my asking perfectly!
Sounds great! I should be able to take a few females and a Tom. I'll have to ask a friend to help me transport though! Are there any good beginner Turkey websites to go to for information so I don't have to drive everyone here wild?

If you go, well we won't(will), take it personnally

...we are the best "beginner turkey website/thread you'll ever need

...ahahha, sorry, i know it is hard to take me seriuosly when i throw that guy up there, but he is just so darn cute!!

I have wanted to use him for my avatar for forever! He belongs to you though. And I like my coffee drinker. For the longest time it made people drink more coffee!

You know darn well that we are here to answer questions.

yeah...what she said....

Looks like we'll be butchering some extra boys today. I have 10 seperated and waiting. I always hate butchering day but it needs to be done. Most of them are legbars that didn't make the breeding cut so there's going to be some skinny cockerel soup. At least the flock will be a little calmer with fewer rambunctious boys in it. There's still probably 25 or so more extra boys that will need to be butchered but they still have another month or so, at least, to grow.

The rest of the flock is angry at the moment because I won't let them out to free range until we're done. It was quite a battle getting their food and water in to them without them getting out lol. I did let out the smallest ones to roam so they wouldn't get trampled and beat up being stuck in there.

In other news, we spent the weekend hanging out at the beach. It was so wonderful but a weekend was nowhere near long enough. Here's some pictures

well, that does look so very inviting, beautiful pics!..and I am not much of a water person, although I have been known to fall in a few trout streams...I bet you could use a few days more, how about a month ..or two?!

Just think, fewer mouths to feed and at least you do get soup.
I got very happy about fifteen minutes ago. I forgot to get meat out of the freezer last night, and really want enchiladas. I grabbed some chicken, thinking I would just wait until tomorrow. Then I remembered that I had canned some chicken!

Wondered where you got to, glad you got a break, even if it was a short one.
We processed 7 extra cockerels last evening, now we can move the grow out pen and refill it with the next round of youngsters....with broodies hatching almost weekly there is never a shortage of hormonal cockerels needing separate housing!
Canning our extra birds was the best thing we ever started doing! It is great to just grab a jar for quick and simple meals!

I HAVE got to get a pressure canner!!!!

....seeing this just shoves that point in my face, would be so very awesome for veggies , soup, and broth!!!

 

[LittleMissPurdy]

Very happy to help. It makes me feel like my college degree was not wasted, since my job is entirely unrelated to horticulture. I tell all my friends I'm happy to "consult" for free, just don't ask me to pick up a shovel. I do enough shoveling of other stuff and dirt is heavy . . .

well, that answers my NEXT question...

...

 

[emorems0]

Now that I am on my phone I can upload a picture of the pheasants

So I had hoped that the new layers would just follow the old layers back into the coop tonight but no dice. They just looked lost and confused. Then they started flying up to the top of the run door to roost... it is 6 1/2 feet up! I finally got them all in once it started getting dark and they stopped running away from me. I sure hope they learn to stay in the run/go in the coop tomorrow because we are leaving for a trip home on Friday and I don't want to make the neighbor deal with that or risk losing more birds because they keep trying to get back to their old pen. I have the run door closed now, but I worry about the old and new birds getting after eachother if I try to lock them all in for a day or two.

 

[LittleMissPurdy]

Didn't mean to go MIA again. I've had a really hard time keeping up here this summer. Popping in to say that hubs embarked on a new project... Pheasants! We have 3 boys and 5 girls, I'm not sure exactly how old they are... not fully mature yet, but old enough to not need supplemental heat. We have them in the chicken tractor for now, but I think the plan is to move them into the turkey pen and process the two turkey hens.

I just moved some chickens into the main coop last night and I hope they go back in the coop tonight instead of trying to sleep in the rose of Sharon bush. I lost two of my older layers the other night to a coyote (I think) because the roost in the coop fell down so the chickens were sleeping in the tree. A coyote can jump a 5 ft fence, right? I felt so bad... and the neighbor across the street heard it all go down because she was on her porch outside. There were hardly any feathers in the run, but two chickens were gone and she heard chickens 'screaming' around 2am.

oh my, that is terrible.

, so sorry.
Our neighbor had lost 20+ birds,chickens and ducks, to coyotes. We have quite a few of them around our area. They had even attacked a neighbors small dog while they had it out.
Some nights, fall especially, you can hear them packing-up. Makes my little poms very nervous!

I hope you have fun with your new endeavor! Pheasants sound very interesting.
I have seen a pheasant pen someone had, it was quite large, and it had room for them to fly. I don't know if that is normal or not, but it looked cool. I have no idea how many they had either..maybe they had a large number of birds and that is why they had such a big pen/enclosure.
Glad you are back!

A beautiful Glad from the neglected side of my yard.

pretty...

Good afternoon all:

Came home from work to find one of my 6mos CCL girls dead in the pen....she wasn't acting quite right yesterday afternoon but was out in the pen in the am drinking from the bowl....well she never was quite right...she was drastically undersized and had her tail feather bent down alll the time....sad to lose her but it is what it is.....

When you do see something isn't right, you almost expect issues. Still doesn't make it easier when something does leave though...

we must have just got our garden in really late. The tomatos are coming in nice, but none really ripe. The cabbage, Brussel sprouts, broccoli and califlower are still really small. My sunflowers are probably only about 3 ft tall and they are suppose to get to 10 to 12ft. I hope everything still turns out.

....We had planted ours later..had so many late freezes, thought we were going to lose the blossoms on the fruit trees. We got very lucky. Have a friend who lost their whole cherry crop to the last freeze..total bummer!!!
I understand every year is different with natures issues, but this one seems a bit of an influx with them.

I hope your veggies produce well for you too!

 

[emorems0]

oh my, that is terrible.

, so sorry.
Our neighbor had lost 20+ birds,chickens and ducks, to coyotes. We have quite a few of them around our area. They had even attacked a neighbors small dog while they had it out.
Some nights, fall especially, you can hear them packing-up. Makes my little poms very nervous!

We are in a little residential neighborhood... large lots and adjacent to gamelands, but still a residential subdivision where kids and dogs are running around pretty freely 3 seasons out of the year. It's definitely not cool to have coyotes in the neighborhood. My neighbor across the street saw one run past her into my yard a few weeks ago. She has german shepherds so she first thought it was one of her dogs that got out somehow in the middle of the night (she was on her porch, smoking). When she realized what it was, she ran inside and sent me a message... hubs and I had just been getting ready to go to bed, so I sent him out to the back porch... he spotted him right away and shot him in the face with the pellet gun we keep at the back door. It wasn't going to really hurt him, but we hoped it would at least dissuade him from hanging around (and we won't keep anything more powerful than a pellet gun out/accessible because we have small children and neighborhood kids here all the time).

The pheasants should be able to fly a little once we get them moved over to the turkey pen, of course, they'll just fly up and hit the bird netting and crash back down... but it's more space than the tractor, and more secure once we finish the improvements we started. I still can't believe my chickens are flying up onto a 6 1/2 foot door. My older layers (BA mostly) definitely could not do that! I might have to re-think my run fencing for these birds!.

 

[AnneInTheBurbs]

X2! For both of us!

I agree with the others, even with my limited knowledge. Sorry!

I think I have won this battle, I timed my asking perfectly!

Sounds great! I should be able to take a few females and a Tom. I'll have to ask a friend to help me transport though! Are there any good beginner Turkey websites to go to for information so I don't have to drive everyone here wild?

If you go, well we won't(will), take it personnally ...we are the best "beginner turkey website/thread you'll ever need ...ahahha, sorry, i know it is hard to take me seriuosly when i throw that guy up there, but he is just so darn cute!!

 
e I have wanted to use him for my avatar for forever! He belongs to you though. And I like my coffee drinker. For the longest time it made people drink more coffee!

You know darn well that we are here to answer questions.

yeah...what she said....

Looks like we'll be butchering some extra boys today. I have 10 seperated and waiting. I always hate butchering day but it needs to be done. Most of them are legbars that didn't make the breeding cut so there's going to be some skinny cockerel soup. At least the flock will be a little calmer with fewer rambunctious boys in it. There's still probably 25 or so more extra boys that will need to be butchered but they still have another month or so, at least, to grow.


The rest of the flock is angry at the moment because I won't let them out to free range until we're done. It was quite a battle getting their food and water in to them without them getting out lol. I did let out the smallest ones to roam so they wouldn't get trampled and beat up being stuck in there.


In other news, we spent the weekend hanging out at the beach. It was so wonderful but a weekend was nowhere near long enough. Here's some pictures

well, that does look so very inviting, beautiful pics!..and I am not much of a water person, although I have been known to fall in a few trout streams...I bet you could use a few days more, how about a month ..or two?!

 
  Just think, fewer mouths to feed and at least you do get soup.
I got very happy about fifteen minutes ago. I forgot to get meat out of the freezer last night, and really want enchiladas. I grabbed some chicken, thinking I would just wait until tomorrow. Then I remembered that I had canned some chicken!

Wondered where you got to, glad you got a break, even if it was a short one.

We processed 7 extra cockerels last evening, now we can move the grow out pen and refill it with the next round of youngsters....with broodies hatching almost weekly there is never a shortage of hormonal cockerels needing separate housing!

Canning our extra birds was the best thing we ever started doing! It is great to just grab a jar for quick and simple meals!

I HAVE got to get a pressure canner!!!! ....seeing this just shoves that point in my face, would be so very awesome for veggies , soup, and broth!!!

So how do you use canned chicken? I know I'm pretty ignorant here, my only exposure to canned meat is chicken breast in a can that I use to make chicken salad.

 
oh my, that is terrible. , so sorry.
Our neighbor had lost 20+ birds,chickens and ducks, to coyotes. We have quite a few of them around our area. They had even attacked a neighbors small dog while they had it out.
Some nights, fall especially, you can hear them packing-up. Makes my little poms very nervous!

We are in a little residential neighborhood... large lots and adjacent to gamelands, but still a residential subdivision where kids and dogs are running around pretty freely 3 seasons out of the year. It's definitely not cool to have coyotes in the neighborhood. My neighbor across the street saw one run past her into my yard a few weeks ago. She has german shepherds so she first thought it was one of her dogs that got out somehow in the middle of the night (she was on her porch, smoking). When she realized what it was, she ran inside and sent me a message... hubs and I had just been getting ready to go to bed, so I sent him out to the back porch... he spotted him right away and shot him in the face with the pellet gun we keep at the back door. It wasn't going to really hurt him, but we hoped it would at least dissuade him from hanging around (and we won't keep anything more powerful than a pellet gun out/accessible because we have small children and neighborhood kids here all the time).

The pheasants should be able to fly a little once we get them moved over to the turkey pen, of course, they'll just fly up and hit the bird netting and crash back down... but it's more space than the tractor, and more secure once we finish the improvements we started. I still can't believe my chickens are flying up onto a 6 1/2 foot door. My older layers (BA mostly) definitely could not do that! I might have to re-think my run fencing for these birds!.

That's spooky to think about with coyotes, I have heard that even medium and large domestic dogs are no match for them. I hope to get a mother large dog eventually, so we will have a little more guiding and protection. The pheasants look adorable! I'm sure they're pretty skittish though. At least you have plenty of room for them.

 

[BullChick]

I use canned chicken for enchiladas, chicken noodle soup, baby/toddler food, dog food (vet recommends chicken and rice for sick dogs) casseroles, and on a salad.
Wingstone had said about canning fried chicken. Never tried it though.

 

[Chaos18]

Now that I am on my phone I can upload a picture of the pheasants


So I had hoped that the new layers would just follow the old layers back into the coop tonight but no dice. They just looked lost and confused. Then they started flying up to the top of the run door to roost... it is 6 1/2 feet up! I finally got them all in once it started getting dark and they stopped running away from me. I sure hope they learn to stay in the run/go in the coop tomorrow because we are leaving for a trip home on Friday and I don't want to make the neighbor deal with that or risk losing more birds because they keep trying to get back to their old pen. I have the run door closed now, but I worry about the old and new birds getting after eachother if I try to lock them all in for a day or two.

What kind of pheasants are they?

 

[bobrut]

get an air soft gun, won't kill it, but will sting it

 

[BullChick]

get an air soft gun, won't kill it, but will sting it

Who?