The Animals – Page 6 – Peacock Orchard

BABY PEACOCKS ARE HERE

I have 2 india blue peahens and an india blue blackshoulder peacock. Last year the hens hatched out 6 eggs combined. All of the babies they hatched died. They were driving me crazy with how terrible they were as mothers. The chickens hatched out pea eggs last year and they had 2 survive. So I was pretty sure it was the hens who sucked. This year I took all but 2 eggs from the peahens. I did let them brood them until we saw they were peeping, then we took 6 from the one peahen and put them in the incubator.

They began hatching out immediately. (Note that I had chicken eggs in the incubator already.)

All 6 hatched.

One chick has spradle leg and we have it taped up. We will see if the chick recovers. You might also notice something a bit….odd.

Albino?????

I am away

My day job is so demanding right now that I just can’t post to the blog. I’ll be out for 2 weeks, from May 4-May 15. Will talk to you when I’m back!

First Turkey Processing Graphic Pics

I have this addiction to buying birds. If they go on sale, watch out! So one year it got a bit out of hand. I bought 5 Giant White turkeys. Unfortunately only 1 lived. We named him Lucky. One of the only birds to ever be named on our property. Shortly after that we bought 9 bourbon red turkeys from a 4Her. After that I was buying food and there were broad breasted bronze turkeys on sale. I bought them all, 10 in total. Feeding time got a bit crazy!

We suffered some deaths. The Bourbon reds kept flying into the dog run and getting eaten by the dogs. I had one broad breasted bronze die from an unknown disorder. Otherwise they did well and grew quickly!

I really loved the turkeys. I just enjoyed having them around. They were funny and slow. Our Son could pet them like puppies. Just enjoyable birds. Unfortunately they were food and it was the weekend before Thanksgiving. We gave most of them away but sold a few. We invited friends over, had my parents watch our kids and got to work killing.

First we got the scalding pot ready. Our scalding pot is an extremely large tamale pot that we got at a flea market in Denver. We heat it with this Bucket Heater. This is the actual bucket heater we bought and use. It is an affiliate link. It was extremely cold the day we did this and it took some time to get the water up to temp. We finally elevated it off of our freezing cold concrete on some blocks. After that we did not need the heat gun to help. The bucket heater heated it just fine.

In anticipation of this day we bought a plucker. Boy am I glad we did! Now I have hand plucked birds. It’s not bad if you are just doing 1. It is bad if you are doing more than that. It takes a large amount of time and can really make a persons fingers ache. So while this plucker was mondo expensive I’m glad we have it.

We caught the bourbon reds first. I thought it would be wise to do smallest to largest. The men were killing, scalding and plucking and I had a friend inside who was helping me gut and bag them.

We hung the birds up and slit their throats. Not pretty but effective and imo, humane.

Here is my beautiful husband holding our large broad breasted bronze Tom. He had a processed weight of 35lbs.

Yup, that’s him.

Doesn’t that plucker work fabulously!

“Lucky” was last. He was 60lbs live weight. Quite the bird to catch and haul.

Took 2 men to hold him for scalding.

Took our entire oven and 1/2 a day but Lucky tasted fabulous!

No Freeze, No Fuss, Automatic Poultry Waterer

As most animal owners know, water is the biggest issue in winter. I bought this Awesome Waterer after spending several winters miserably hauling water out to the barn in milk jugs. My problem is that I have ducks and chickens together. So, as soon as I bring out water the ducks dive in and splash it all out of the dish.

I bought the waterer and tested it through the summer. I wanted to see if it could handle the duck stress. It did so admirably. So the next step was winterizing it. To do that I needed to buy a very short hose. I tried to find one at a local box store but I waited too late into fall and could find none. So I ended up buying this 4′ Utility Hose. I then had to buy some heat tape to keep it all from freezing. This proved difficult again as I wanted an odd size of tape. I ended up purchasing this heat tape. It was just long enough. Home Depot does carry this brand of heat tape but I could only find 6′ and 12′ in my store. I needed enough to go over our spigot and run around the water dish. 9′ was just barely long enough. I then bought some pipe insulation and set it all up. I used electrical tape to tape it all together.

Here is my lovely finished product. I have always used 1/2 a dog kennel for summer watering so I put the dish inside it and filled around it with sand to keep down on the mess. I need to buy more sand to perfect it.

I did end up adding more tape to the section of hose that you can see in this picture.

My welshies hang about the water area. I just empty it out once a day. When it is really cold (in the single digits) I do have to go break the ice off the very top of it in the mornings. Otherwise it is doing really well. It has only frozen once, and then because someone unplugged the heat tape. I don’t want to point fingers but I have noticed a particular chicken that thinks it needs to perch on the extension cord.

This post contains affiliate links. I bought those exact products from Amazon and attest to their greatness.

Blue’s first tail display

Blue has grown a mighty fine train. This weekend was the first time I’ve seen him display it. I had to take the pictures from inside the house. I didn’t want to spook him off. Still, marvelous!

Oh, but the ladies were not impressed.

This is our front lawn. I had swept a bunch of cat food out onto it and the peas have been busy hunting it out.

Blue kept trying to threaten this rooster but the rooster was unimpressed. Blue needn’t waste his time. This rooster is very young still but I have a feeling we will be forced to eat him. He’s a bit….too friendly with people. I think he’ll get mean.

I’ve raised these peas since they were 6 weeks old. I’ve lost 2 but the remaining 3 are marvelous!

Here is a baby pic.