Being as it is Sunday today I rinsed and filled nine 5-gallon waterers, filled fifteen tube feeders and recharged the battery for the henyard fence charger. That's the regular Sunday chores. I also opened up the rooster house and put down their feed, threw a can of scratch into the hen yard, and looked in on everyone in the various tractors. Come night fall I closed up the rooster house and the gate on the hen yard after they had free ranged all afternoon. Those are the every day chores.
All of the special stuff I did was yesterday. Put two more birds into the hospital cage (total of three now), moved all of the easter eggers into one tractor, the Leghorn cross pullets into the tractor with the other Leghorns their age, and moved a tom turkey out of one tractor into another to keep the numbers right. Those Leghorn cross girls have turned out to be terrible feather pickers so they had to come out of the tractor with the EE girls. If they do the same thing to the straight Leghorn girls they are going to get their necks wrung. Doctoring injured birds is not my idea of a good time.
Yesterday I also sorted roosters into those I'm keeping for breeding and those who are going to the swap. The new roosters that I'm keeping got locked in the rooster house while the older boys had to spend the day in their yard. Come dark I let them in to roost. Only a minimal amount of fussing today except for one bird, but by nightfall it looked like that might resolve itself OK.
Spent about an hour sitting on my butt enjoying the afternoon sun watching the doings in the rooster pen trying to figure out which bird was where in the newly established pecking order. Only came to a conclusion about a third of the birds. The others didn't give me enough of a clue to decide. I did come to the realization they can hear better than I can in the higher registers because they started giving the warning call several seconds before I could hear the hawk myself.
All of the special stuff I did was yesterday. Put two more birds into the hospital cage (total of three now), moved all of the easter eggers into one tractor, the Leghorn cross pullets into the tractor with the other Leghorns their age, and moved a tom turkey out of one tractor into another to keep the numbers right. Those Leghorn cross girls have turned out to be terrible feather pickers so they had to come out of the tractor with the EE girls. If they do the same thing to the straight Leghorn girls they are going to get their necks wrung. Doctoring injured birds is not my idea of a good time.
Yesterday I also sorted roosters into those I'm keeping for breeding and those who are going to the swap. The new roosters that I'm keeping got locked in the rooster house while the older boys had to spend the day in their yard. Come dark I let them in to roost. Only a minimal amount of fussing today except for one bird, but by nightfall it looked like that might resolve itself OK.
Spent about an hour sitting on my butt enjoying the afternoon sun watching the doings in the rooster pen trying to figure out which bird was where in the newly established pecking order. Only came to a conclusion about a third of the birds. The others didn't give me enough of a clue to decide. I did come to the realization they can hear better than I can in the higher registers because they started giving the warning call several seconds before I could hear the hawk myself.
