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Wednesday, 19th March 2014
When we went to muck out the chickens this morning, Victoria (our Bronze turkey) was trying to nest and lay her egg in the poultry house: not ideal as she had chosen a spot underneath where several chickens had been perching the night before (no need to tell you what was on the floor...). We picked her up to move her to one of the spare houses (left open and all strawed up for the specify purpose of being good places to lay eggs...) only to discover Camilla (our Slate turkey) was already nesting in the first one we chose. So, it was onto another spare house for Victoria (shutting her in so she could not escape) where about 20 minutes later she produced her first egg, Camilla did likewise in her house and when we then went back to the barn, we found Katherine under the 'goat stand' having just laid her third egg this week.
We have now had THREE turkey eggs in one day and so now have a total of five and all (as the photo shows) are looking good. If the girls carry on like this we will soon have enough to put in the incubator (or even under one of them if they go broody). Turkeys lay every other day or two out of three days as a rule, although last year we regularly had five eggs in one week from Elizabeth (she is our older Bourbon Red turkey who was attacked by the fox in the autumn, she is doing okay but still recovering so we are not expecting her to start laying any time soon...).
Finger crossed when we do start to incubate the eggs that they are all fertile.
And talking of 'broodiness', we are now on day 13 with our bantam eggs, so just eight to go. We candled the eggs again tonight and all five are growing well. In the photo you can see a few red blood vessels which show the chick is still alive. The dark mass at the top is the chick itself and the light space at the bottom is full of air that is allowing the growing chick to breath. At this stage you can sometimes actually see the chick moving although it is hard to make out the individual parts! All quite incredible...
