2021 Meat Birds - Week One

Here is the first weekly installment we'll post for the next 8 weeks until these creatures are fully grown and will reside in the deep freeze.  We'll discuss challenges, victories, and the ins and outs of raising your own meat birds for home consumption.  In the last installment, we showed how we moved the 3 day old chicks out of the makeshift brooder in the garage and out into the chicken tractor.

Over the last week we've experienced some 80 degree weather (in late December)!  The chicks were hot.  We turned off the heat lamps.  Then we encountered some cooler weather (in the mid-upper 30's).  The chicks were cold.  We turned the heat lamps back on and lowered them.  If you don't do this, they'll pile up on one another to stay warm and the ones on the bottom will suffocate.  Let's just say we learned this the hard way.

A week into it, and we've only lost one.  That one was smaller than the others.  I think it came in weak from the hatchery.  Before we could quarantine in and nurse it along, it got trampled by the other 50 chicks.  So where we originally had 51 chicks, now we have 50.  Now that we've got them this far, the only fatalities we should experience is from accidents.  We have learned our lesson there, too.  Each day we move the tractor to fresh grass.  If you aren't paying attention, you'll run over them.  There's no bringing back a flat chicken.

So we do this every week.  We bring in a bird and weigh him or her.  We look the bird over and record the weight, comparing with last year's bird at this time and make general observations.  Here we go.  Last week the bird was a yellow puff ball.  This week it is bigger and you can see the white feathers coming out on its wings.  It is slowly making a metamorphosis from a cute thing to a monster bird.  I put a 'diaper' of sorts on top of the scale, so the bird doesn't christen the kitchen scale.  (I would be sleeping out in the chicken tractor if that was to occur!)

The bird weighed 7 ounces.  I wish I would have weighed them the day they came in the mail.

I will be posting shortly the weigh in for Week 2 of the 2021 Cornish Cross Meat Bird Project.  Stay tuned!