Birds as far as the eye can see

Many of you have visited when we have a plethora of feathered friends running around the back yard. The first year we picked up ten Amauricana and we were getting more eggs than we know what to do with. Now we have a lot more chickens, but they have a tendency to lay all over the backyard, sometimes even just stopping and laying eggs right in the middle of the paths. We have set areas where we can find eggs, but it would be nice to not have to go looking all over the place. Jed and I are thinking about a couple of different strategies to our excess of birds. The set number of birds we would like to have are: 2 geese (mating pair), 3 turkeys (1 male, 2 female), 4 ducks (1 male, 3 female), and 6 chickens (possibly all female). This would be a low number until we are able to get all the the plants growing at a healthy rate and still maintain a healthy bird population. This would provide all the eggs we need with the addition of meat from our flock but at a more reasonable quantity. Our goal will be for family production and not for sale. This way we can focus and balance out the food intake as well as the meat and egg production without too much waste. They will also provide the much needed fertilizer without the overkill of some of our larger flocks we've had in the past. We're hoping the lower quantities will also make for a quieter environment. Our goal will be to grow our meat production from spring to fall (or whenever they are ready) and then slaughter them so that we do not overwinter any extra birds. The plucker will help us with this process and I'm sure the second plucker will help us that much more as we have worked out many of the kinks of the first plucker.

We've have set numbers of birds that we know that they can hatch out: Geese (12-25), turkeys (12-20), ducks (6-20), chickens (12-22). We're not sure if we would like to have additional meat chickens as the Amauricans are tiny and do not provide that much meat. We might do some large chickens and some egg chickens so that we have a mixture of both. It is interesting to see the dynamics of the bird flocks and see how we wish to change it. As with everything else in the farm, we learn by doing. We'll see what works for our property and we'll see what we can do to make it work well. We'll probably post more in the future, as with all topics, but for now I think our goal will be to decrease our bird numbers to a more managable quantity.