The possibility of turkey

As many of you know, we have horrible luck keeping male turkeys on the farm. For some reason all the predators love the taste of male turkeys or once they are grown they are too dumb to keep themselves from committing suicide. (FYI - jump attacking Jed is a form of suicide.) We were thinking about picking up another set of turkeys next year, but luckily we had the good fortune of going to one of the local nurseries and it turns out they have a heritage breed tom. They said that they used to have a pair but that the female was eaten by predators, which left them with a lone male turkey. We're going to see about picking him up and seeing if he can aclimate to our homestead, at least long enough to farther some new baby poults and then we can take him back. We were thinking about keeping two females and a male turkey to hatch out new turkeys for us. At first Jed thought that might not provide enough turkeys until we realized that they have a tendency to hatch out 15-25 eggs at a time, which means we'd end up with 20-50 turkeys (accounting for bad eggs and such) a year. That's a lot of turkey. I don't think we can eat a turkey a week, but we can definitely try. Turkeys have turned out to be the best keepers of our homestead, so who knows, we might end up just keeping tukeys and lowering our chicken count.


Image from http://www.porterturkeys.com/narragansett.htm

 The tom looked to be a narrangansett, which is what some of our birds are. The rest of our turkeys are Bourbon Reds.