Blue ribbon turkey hen

This turkey hen deserves a blue ribbon. She managed to go outside my perimeter fence, hoard 12 eggs, hatch them, and then return with 10 turkey poults, all alive and well. I'm a little amazed she made it given our recent issues with coyotes, who hunt by smell mostly -- so camouflage isn't effective at all.

If you click on the picture you can see an eastern wild poult, a royal palm, a couple of spanish black and two blue slate poults. The turkeys will all lay in a nest for few days, and then one of the hens will sit on the groups eggs. The other turkeys go lay in another spot, and so on.

Her prize for managing to hatch these poults is that she gets to raise them herself. When we discovered her we caught her and the babies and moved them into a calf shelter that'll provide security for her and the poults and all the food and water they can eat. She's very protective of her poults. My leaning into the calf dome to take this picture caused her to call the alarm and go to gather the poults to her.

I like the heritage turkeys for this sort of thing. Natural nesting, good mothers.

First turkey / Turkey brooding

This poult is about 3 minutes out of the egg, all wet and wobbly, peeping a little.

I've found that turkey poults are more challenging to raise than chickens. So here's the regimen I use to minimize turkey poult loss:

1) I hatch my own. Shipping losses from hatcheries last year were 30% out of the box, and that sucks when they cost $9-12/each. No shipping means no shipping stress, better survival.

2) They stay in the brooder until they're warm and dry, usually 12 hours after they hatch. Starting warm and dry is pretty important.

3) The lights in the brooding bin are set close enough to make the wood chip surface 103 degrees. The turkey poults will move into this "hot" area and out of it and regulate their own temperature. So there's a 1 square foot area of "hot" and the rest of the area is various levels of heat less than that.

4) For the first two days I put a layer of newspaper over the chips. Turkeys will eat the chips, fill their stomach with it, and die. The newspaper prevents them from eating the chips. Yes, you do run a risk of spraddle, but I've never lost a turkey to spraddle and i've lost quite a few to wood chips. You remove the paper after the first two days or if it gets wet or slick.

5) I have chickens, and I supplement a high-protein chick starter with crumbled hard boiled chicken eggs. In my opinion, turkeys cannot have too much protein.

6) In the feed, and the water, I put a handful of clear glass marbles. The type people put in vases to hold flowers up. The turkeys are irresistibly attracted to shiny and they peck at the shiny marbles, and their beak slides off and into the food and water. They get the the idea faster this way.

7) as I put each turkey into the brooder I dip its beak into the water.

8) after all of the turkeys are in the bin, I tap on the food. They run over to see what the tapping is, and they try to peck my finger, and then the food. This seems to help them get it.

9) I put two or three chicken chicks in with each group of 20 turkeys. The chickens understand the food and water situation, and the turkeys watch them, and figure it out based on that. Yes, you run the risk of losing turkeys to blackhead disease but my experience has been ok so far.

If I do all of these things, I'll only lose 2-3% of the turkeys in the first 4 weeks. If I skip any of these steps I'll lose a progressively larger percentage. If I treat these little turkeys identically to chicken chicks, I'll typically lose 30-40%.

The pigs have decided: National turkey free day

When it's laying season I pen the turkeys into these calf domes.

Each calf dome is 5' tall, about 7' in diameter. We use them as portable shelters for pasture farrowing, covers for sacks of feed, confining laying turkeys and (gasp) even their intended purpose of bottle feeding calves.

put a 30 gallon garbage can with some hay in it as a nesting box (turkey hens are big animals, and a 30 gallon can is about the right size), and string this recycled construction fence across the entrance. You don't need much of a barrier to keep turkeys in. The orange fencing is mostly a visual barrier.

The orange fencing is also known as pig dental floss. They love it. So yesterday three of the smallest pigs I've got slipped out of their electric fence, and over to the turkey domes, and proceeded to let every single turkey loose. They pulled the orange fencing off the front and out came the turkeys.

This was such a success in the eyes of the pigs that they decided a roadtrip was in order. So these same small pig terrorists chewed the power cord off the electric fence, and then proceeded to lead the entire herd out of the pasture and onto the road. And then down the road. And then over the bridge. All in all, about a mile down the road.

So when I got to the farm, I was stopped at my gate by a neighbor who'd seen the pigs down the road, and the dogs and I herded them back over to the property, only to discover when I got there that all 70 turkeys were out. So I spent 4 hours chasing and netting turkeys, fixing the fence, netting more turkeys, herding pigs back in, and so on.

Moral of this story: Good fences, particularly perimeter fencing, is worth its weight in gold. Guess what my next project will be.

Bourbon red turkeys

The bourbon red turkeys have been popular with the livestock thieves this year. Maybe they read the reviews that said that bourbon reds were the tastiest heritage breed, or maybe they were just the slowest ones, but I've lost 6 toms and 7 hens. So I've penned the remaining bourbon reds far away from the road, and was happy to see them start laying today.

The hens weigh about 15 pounds and the toms around 20. They're pretty hearty and survive well here. When I started I purchased poults of 17 different turkey varieties. I've now settled on 7 varieties that I raise. For my farm, the eastern wild turkeys are the easiest to raise -- they pretty much fend for themselves and are excellent at foraging. In fact, they tend to teach the other turkeys how to eat blackberries and strip the seeds off the top of grass stems.

The bourbon reds are somewhere in the middle. They're fairly intelligent (for a turkey), docile birds with a nice color pattern. They're calm in disposition and are curious. The one thing about bourbon red turkeys is that they usually hate Andrea. Not sure why, but every year there's been two or three hens that have decided that Andrea should be chased, and they do chase her.