Kalkukulukoen
Hatching
- Jun 19, 2023
- 2
- 1
- 6
Hello all,
Long time reader, first time post.
Apologies if this topic has already been fully discussed. I couldn’t find it, anyway.
I have a tom and three turkey hens (3xGers black, 1xBlue slate).
We always kept them with the chickens, but this mating season they started killing off the chickens one by one.
So we sent them out into the meadow, where they started laying, and things seemed to be going well.
The hens all went broody in April. A short while later, so did the Tom…. First we thought this was funny, and let him have his way. However, it soon turned out that he Had crushed most of the eggs, and was sitting on nothing more than a pile of rotting scrambled eggs. While the hen whose nest it was sat patiently nearby.
To get them off the nest, we shut them out of the coop, forcing them to sleep outside. This put them at risk of fox attack. The other two hens were nesting outside in the bushes. It wasn’t long before our Tom found the other nests and proceeded to evict the hens and crush the eggs.
So we gave up and threw away all the eggs. But the turkeys all continued to sit. And sit. And sit.
It is now mid/late June. They barely eat or drink. They’re covered with flies. There are no live eggs, no possibility of hatching chicks.
Does anyone have tips on unbroodifying(?) the turkeys? And especially what to do about the male?
We don’t want them to have chicks this year, out in the meadow there is too much predation, and we don’t have the infrastructure to house them separately.
Many thanks!
Long time reader, first time post.
Apologies if this topic has already been fully discussed. I couldn’t find it, anyway.
I have a tom and three turkey hens (3xGers black, 1xBlue slate).
We always kept them with the chickens, but this mating season they started killing off the chickens one by one.
So we sent them out into the meadow, where they started laying, and things seemed to be going well.
The hens all went broody in April. A short while later, so did the Tom…. First we thought this was funny, and let him have his way. However, it soon turned out that he Had crushed most of the eggs, and was sitting on nothing more than a pile of rotting scrambled eggs. While the hen whose nest it was sat patiently nearby.
To get them off the nest, we shut them out of the coop, forcing them to sleep outside. This put them at risk of fox attack. The other two hens were nesting outside in the bushes. It wasn’t long before our Tom found the other nests and proceeded to evict the hens and crush the eggs.
So we gave up and threw away all the eggs. But the turkeys all continued to sit. And sit. And sit.
It is now mid/late June. They barely eat or drink. They’re covered with flies. There are no live eggs, no possibility of hatching chicks.
Does anyone have tips on unbroodifying(?) the turkeys? And especially what to do about the male?
We don’t want them to have chicks this year, out in the meadow there is too much predation, and we don’t have the infrastructure to house them separately.
Many thanks!
You can spray them with fly repellant also, but I still like to bathe mine if they've busted a stinky egg in the nest and have gunk on their feathers. Dawn dish washing liquid or even baby shampoo works to bathe them.
