Wednesday, October 8, 2014

New chickens experience freedom




 We are starting to let the new chickens out a bit.  They were quite reluctant to leave the coop when we opened the door but they did find their way to the edge of the woods and seemed to enjoy scratching in the fallen leaves. Hopefully they will merge into the existing flock easily. We are counting on their larger size and the presence of a rooster to help with the integration. We lost 2 of our older birds to a predator several weeks back so we decided that two of these meat birds would get to remain as layer birds. This breed, Black Jersey Giants,  are supposed to be good mothers and we would like to be able to have them raise some chicks.  They are also supposed to be good layers thru the winter. We hope they will start laying soon. Once we get them situated into the laying flock, the other two will go in the freezer. If you remember, we got these 6 meat birds on Memorial Day and they looked like this: 


 Two of them are already in the freezer as they were roosters and started to get rowdy.  Roosters are very territorial and more than one rooster in a small flock is problematic. So we solved that problem.  

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