pullets

[dragonlady7]

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I have a pocket full of black and white striped feathers, that I picked up from where they’d been shed, finding them in the dusk in the short trampled-down grass.

They’re going to transition the laying flock over from the various commercial egg-production hybrid breeds to a heritage breed, Barred Rocks, which are a black and white striped, very lovely old breed, heavy-bodied and sturdy and reasonably good at egg production. So, to that end, they bought day-old chicks in the spring, and have been raising them, first in a brooder, now on pasture for some weeks.

But now we need the pasture pens for meat chickens, because we need to repurpose one of the chicken pasture pens to accomodate the turkeys, so the pullets, as those chicks now are (pullet meaning immature hen that’s not laying yet), are going into the Turkaboose, the repurposed hay wagon we used for turkeys last year that the turkeys… didn’t fit in very well. (So named because it kind of looks like a caboose… kind of. Listen we’re not like, Shakespeare here.)

So we had to get the pullets out of the pasture pens and into the Turkaboose. And the way to do this, because you can’t really super-effectively herd chickens, particularly not really active ones like young Barred Rocks (who can sort of more or less fly, a bit), is to hand-carry them a few at a time, and the way to do this is to do it in the dark, when they’re asleep.

Well, they weren’t asleep. We got up there after sundown but before last light, and they were still awake and clucking at us. As it got dark, their resistance got less effective, but only because they could no longer see us. They weren’t really asleep, though they weren’t… as alert.

Another fact about chickens, besides that they can’t see at all in the dark, is that if you hold them upside-down they sort of faint. So the way you move chickens is that you scoop them up, flip them upside down, and hold them by one knee joint between your fingers; you can get three or four of them in each hand this way, if you’re good at catching them.

I discovered that while yes, many of them will in fact go woozy and unresisting if you do this, some of them will flap and do anything they can, curling up to keep their heads upright and flapping and fighting you. So I tended to be able to carry only three or four chickens at once, and sometimes I did so by trapping their wings against their bodies and holding them under my arms. Sometimes I’d have two hanging from their legs between my fingers, one shoved under my elbow, and one clutched in my whole other arm shrieking the whole way.

The upside-down ones, I’d gently lay them down into the hay in the Turkaboose, and often they’d just lie there, as if dead, and sometimes I really worried i’d hurt them, but on my next trip they were always gone, righted and scrambled away into the safety of the Turkaboose and its roosts. (”You really can’t hurt them,” VM said, reassuringly, “not like that.”)

One time I went to pick one up from the pasture pen and i thought it was dead, squashed against the wall of the pen by a crush of the others, lying in a sad little heap with its head under it. Sadly I turned it over, meaning to at least take it out and put it on the tractor. As I got its foot in my hand it squawked and leapt up to try to fly away, but fortunately I didn’t lose my grip.

So, we did it; six of us moved about 300 pullets into the Turkaboose, listening as we did to the live music coming from the bar down the street and echoing along the curved bank of the Poestenkill. It sounded like maybe a bad Eagles cover band…but it’s hard to fairly assess a band by how it sounds echoing off a river bank into a field. We did think the neighboring houses must have thought us insane, shadowy figures in the dark and chickens screaming and the bass thumping from down the street. At least nobody called the cops. It’d be hard to explain to the cops just what you thought was going on. Yes, many of the chickens are pastured right by the road; they’re protected from theft by animals by the electromesh fence, and protected from theft by humans solely by the fact that there’s not a lot of demand for stealing half-grown chickens alive and screaming. Also, the neighbors have a darn good view of it (and there aren’t any roosters in those batches, so it’s not that loud, and they’re moved often, so it doesn’t smell too bad), but as we discovered, they wouldn’t interfere after dark if someone … came… with a crew… and a tractor… to… ok yeah it was obviously us the whole time. (Also we left the Turkaboose right there when we were done; the tractor (being the fancy new one) has lights but why move it in the dark when it doesn’t matter, the chickens won’t need to be in their new pasture until morning.)

This winter the pullets will have to be moved from the Turkaboose into the greenhouse side of the livestock barn, so we’ll have to do the same thing again, but I think the Turkaboose will be easier to unload than the pasture pens, which you sometimes have to crawl in. (No, they’re not the old Salatin-style pens anymore, thank heavens.)

Comments

[shy_magpie]

I love this insight into this kind of life, it never would have occurred to me that moving chickens would be a big deal.