The 2015 Meat Birds - Three Weeks Old

Good evening.  It's time to get on the scale - the chickens, that is.  Each week we gather one Cornish Cross and one Red Ranger and put them up on the scale to gauge their growth over their livespans.  I scooped up our two birds and the Red Ranger promptly left his calling card on my work bench. Yuck!  The Cornish Cross on the left below has a huge, bulging crop that is filled with food.  It is unreal how much they can eat.

Cornish Cross (left) and Red Ranger (right)

I normally put them in buckets, but decided to put an old rag over the scale and zero it out and just set the birds up there.  First up, the Red Ranger.

The Red Ranger weighed 9 ounces.  Last week he weighed 5 ounces, so he almost doubled his weight.

Next I placed the Cornish Cross on the scale.   Now you can tell just from picking him up that he is thicker, plumper, and heavier that the Red Rangers.  He's so fat and lazy, he just sits down on the scale.

The Cornish Cross weighed 14 ounces, up a half of a pound from last week.

Cornish Cross at 14 ounces

The weather this past week has been trying.  It has been unseasonably cold for us in March, with temperatures dipping down into the 20's and we had sleet one day. That is not optimal weather for chicken ranching.  Despite the fact that I insulated the sides of the brooders and lowered the heat lamps, they still piled on top of each other directly under the lamp.  This suffocates and kills the smallest, weakest birds who find themselves covered by other birds.

Last week we had 103 birds.  Currently we have 98.  5 birds died this week due to suffocation.  We decided to move the birds out of the garage today in order to give them more space out on pasture in one of our chicken tractors.  I'm thinking that this may slow down or hopefully end the mortality that we're seeing.  We'll show you where we moved them in upcoming posts.