My Weekend of Life, Death and Rescues

By now you know that I had over a dozen chickens and 7 turkeys hatch this weekend.  I still have a lot of chicken and turkey eggs in the incubator and am loosing hope that they are going to hatch.  If nothing happens with them by Tuesday I will take them out and and dispose of them.  I will then sanitize it and put in some more chicken eggs.  I do have 5 turkey eggs that hopefully will hatch next Monday and 10 that will hopefully hatch in 3 weeks and 2 days.  These eggs are from Thelma and Ted and hope they do better than the ones I bought.

Not all the chickens and turkeys have lived and that is just part of the game.  Of the 7 turkeys 3 have died and 2 have leg problems (so did the ones that died) and 2 are doing excellent.  The chickens have done much better and have lost only 2 of them.  The rest are just happy and all over their brooder.

When we rescued the 10 hens and 3 roosters from up the road they were not taken care of very good and have come a long way since we brought them home.  Brandon took one of the roosters to add to his flock so he could have fertile eggs and has several eggs in his incubator that he got from us as an early birthday present and paid for the rest by doing yard chores for me all weekend.  One of the hens died about a week after we got her so that left us with the 2 roosters and 9 hens.  Everything has been going fine until a couple days ago when we noticed the red rooster fighting with the Easter Egger rooster who is also his father.  Today I noticed the father was bleeding and was staying in the coop all day.  I went out to do one more check of everything before it got dark and went in the coop got another egg but did not see the rooster.  I went out to the run and still could not find him and then noticed that a bunch of the chickens were in the back corner of the run making all kinds of noise.  Went back there and in the corner on the ground was the rooster and they were pecking him, at first I thought he was dead.  I realized he was still alive and kept hitting the fence trying to distract them until I could get Ron's attention so he could come out and help me rescue him.  Ron  got in and got him and then I held him while he sat up the cage we have.  The only places I could see where he was bleeding was from his feet and face.  We put the cage in the shed, added some straw, food and water and he seemed much happier.  When we put the food and water in he acted like he hadn't ate for a while.  Looks like we will be finding a new home for the red rooster.