2017 Meat Birds - 4 Weeks Old

This evening for the weekly weigh-in on Wednesday night, I had to walk out in the backyard to get the birds.  Yes, I moved the meat birds out of the garage this past Sunday afternoon.  They were really just stinking and the flies were getting bad in the garage.  Since we use the back door primarily, we were having flies come in the house and that's not good.  So we moved them out and I'll likely talk about that in tomorrow's post.  It has been a little chilly the past several nights and the birds don't really have all their feathers, so they bunch up under the heat lamp to stay warm.

Under the heat lamps

 I walked out with a 5 gallon bucket, and picked up one of them, put him in the bucket and brought him in to the scale in the garage.  Last week I showed you how I marked the bird we're weighing by tying a ribbon around its neck.  Well, that didn't last a day.  It fell off and I found the ribbon on the floor of the brooder.  Since we're going to eat these birds, I don't want to put paint on their heads, so here's what I'm going to do: I'll just pick up an average sized bird each week and weigh it. It won't be the smallest and it won't be the biggest.

I took the bird out of the bucket and placed him on top of the scale.  He has a wide, muscular stance and his legs look like they are too big for his body.  He is a monster, for sure.

The four week old bird weighed in at 2 pounds 4 ounces this week.

Here are the results from Week 4 :

*Week 4 2017:  2 pounds 4 ounces

*Week 4 2016:  2 pound 15 ounces

*Week 4 2015:    1 pound 4 ounces

So to summarize, last week they weighed on average 1 pound 9 ounces and this week 2 pound 4 ounces. That means they gained 11 ounces over the last week.  They are still 11 ounces shy of where they were at this age last year, but a full pound heavier than what the 2015 birds weighed at this age.