2024 Meat Birds - 1 Week Old

As we've done in prior years, during our meat bird project we'll have weekly updates where we weigh them and discuss how they are doing.  Tonight is episode one.

As time goes on, you notice trends.  Things happen time after time.  When I was farming, I remember plowing the same field year after year.  The turns you made until you finished plowing were the same turns you made in previous years.  The tractor could almost be on auto pilot.  Other things the Lord put in nature comes at the same time every year.  The live oak leaves fall and are replaced with fresh growth, quickly followed by tassels.  Then the little stinging caterpillars fall from the trees.  Ugh!  Then, the june bugs come.  I call them june bugs, but that's not their name, I'm sure.  It's only April.

Anyhow, like clouds of locusts the june bugs come.  Tonight, I thought of a brilliant idea.  Those don't come often, so I thought I should act on it.  I turned on the flood lights and the light attracted the june bugs.  I picked them up.

I learned that I could fit 21 of them in the palm of my hand.  The crawling sensation gave me the frissons.  I threw them down in the brooder and found that the old saying "quicker than a chicken on a june bug" is true!  Those dudes and dudettes went absolutely crazy chasing down the bugs and devouring them.  These are straight run chicks, so I won't know how many are male versus female until a little later.  You want males because they grow bigger and faster.

This is Friday night entertainment on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  I watched the chicks scurry around, grabbing a june bug in their beak.  Then other chicks would try to steal it.  What fun!

I kept walking back to the light and collecting more bugs that were attracted to it...  Like moths to a flame, they sealed their doom.  As of this writing, I've fed 97 bugs to the chicks.  I think they are still hungry believe it or not, so I'll go back out and collect some more high protein june bugs.

So on Wednesday, the majority of the birds (less the 7 we got a few days earlier) turned a week old.  Time to put one on the scale.  This is Tricia's kitchen scale, so I put a piece of paper on it to keep it somewhat clean should the bird decide to have his daily constitutional.

As you can see, at one week old this one weighs 6 1/2 ounces.  Last week it weighed 3 ounces.  It's doubled in size, adding 3 1/2 ounces of body weight in one week.  In looking at prior years' weights, they have been between 6 and 8 ounces at one week, so we're right in the ballpark.

I'll wager that if I feed them 100 june bugs a night, they might weigh as much as me by next week!