Last weekend was rather productive for one that included a planned half-day tequila-recovery couch session.
All of our cornish cross meat birds are now in the freezer. They had gotten pretty big and...well we wanted the space for our barred rocks. We processed nine birds in about 4 hours. They were 7 weeks old and already huge.
While we'll be keeping the barred rocks for a while, we don't intend to raise meat birds again. Hybrid chickens are just a bit too unnatural for us. We started with 15 birds seven weeks ago. One wasn't growing well at all (we named him Colin Creevey) and started acting pretty sick. He was actually growing a lot in his rear, but not anywhere else. Odd genetics for poor little Colin. He was euthanized a few weeks ago. We also lost two birds to, we assume, heart failure. Corish x's, as a result of their breeding, have a tendency to eat themselves to death. While the barred rocks can be trusted to ration their own food, we learned we could only let the cornish crosses have access to food for 12 hours a day.
But now they are gone and our life is lot easier. They were unintelligent, high-maintenance birds. This will be the last you see of them, but expect lots of adorable barred rock photos to come.
Those are pretty awesome socks.
ReplyDeleteAlso, we have a batch of egg layers too! We have americaunas and sex-link black (although, I am starting to be suspicious that one of the fail-proof sex-link black pullets is actually a cockerel...might have to ask you for pointers on processing a chicken)