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2005 Poultry Project Results 2005 Geese 2005 Chickens 2005 Losses Show Chickens 2005 Results 2005 Geese After last year we decided to focus on Pilgrim geese because they are easy to sex and so it's easy to determine who to keep for breeding. I ordered 8 Pilgrim goslings from Metzer. They were all due to arrive 11 April 2005. The Post Office lost the box and the poor goslings did not arrive until the 14th. Most were dead. Metzer was wonderful and replaced them with no complaints. I cannot stress enough how good they were to work with. Based on our results though I would strongly urge all buyers to pay the extra for the Oasis supplement that many hatcheries, including Metzer, offers when shipping baby birds. If we had done that we would not have lost so many babies. Birds can be safely shipped in the post office and ther is no reason to prevent their shipping but failures in delivery can cause losses. Some may be avoidable by ordering the supplement with your baby birds. Our geese did very well and we butchered the spares in late September. We hand plucked them ry then scalded and use the pluckng machine to get the rest of the feathers out. The geese were 24 weeks old and with the exception of one all cleaned up fairly well. We picked the 2 best geese and the best gander to keep back as breeding stock. The Goslings The Goslings Out on Pasture Our Breeding Trio 2005 Chickens 2005 Chickens For 2005 we decided to try to brood a larger batch at one time. We also had a neighbor hatch out one incubator load for us from the chickens we kept back last winter. On 11 March 2005 we got 156 chicks from Ideal. For butcher chickens we got Buff Cornish, Buff Rock, Buff Orpington and we also tried 2 new breeds, Buff Chantecler and Red Broilers. For the show chickens we got Golden Lakenvelders, Buff Minorca, Buff Catalana, Gold Spangled Hamburg and Brown Rose Comb Leghorns. To save money we purchased all straight run birds. Our neighbor hatched out 25 chicks for us from our Buff Cornish and Golden Campine roosters and our Buff Cornish and Buff Orpington hens. We started with brooding 181 chicks and lost 15 birds total. We had planned to keep 21 chickens over winter but with the losses we only had 14 birds to keep this winter. We butchered some of the old hens, a number of irritating small roosters from the show chicken breeds and the designated butcehr chickens. We butchered a total of 161 birds and got 505.5 pounds of meat. Our feed efficiency was bad, 5.9 pounds of feed per pound of chicken but we again fed many squirrels and wild birds. I have no way to fix this and keep them totally free ranging. We had planned to keep some hens from each of the show chicken breeds but we ended up with mostly roosters. In future we will pay extra to buy only pullets from our show breeds. The hatching was not as successful as we had hoped. We had been told that it was hard to hatch chicks at our altitude and the chicks we got were much weaker and more frail than the hatchery birds. Until we can solve the hatching problems we will buy our chicks from a hatchery. We free range our birds as soon as we can. 2005 Chicken on Pasture 2005 Chicken on Pasture Go To Top Brooding Losses We lost 10 chicks in the brooding period. Predator Losses A dog killed 5 birds later including some we had planned to keep for breeding and we lost our only roosters. So we will not be breeding any chickens in 2006. Chickens on Range Some of the older hens still think they should lay eggs in the hay pile not in the new nests. Hen and Cat Go To Top Show Chickens We again showed chickens at the County fair. For 2005 we took Golden Lakenvelders, Gold Spangled Hamburgs and one Buff Chantecler hen. Show Chicken Bath Day Show Chicken Bath Day Show Chicken Bath Day Show Chicken Bath Day Getting Ready on Show Day Show Day Show Day Show Day Teaching our Guard Dog to Guard the Chickens Go To Top