Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

After the quiet of yesterday, today has been a little more eventful. The most exciting news is that Katherine has hatched some of her baby turkeys: how many we are not sure as we did not want to disturb her too much, especially as some chicks may not yet have emerged from their eggs. When we peeked under her we saw at least three though! Our plan at the moment is to bring her into the barn tomorrow and see if she will be able to look after them in the relative peace of one of the winter chicken stalls. We have mentioned before that turkeys don't always make great mums (see 19th March) and our plan was to take the chicks away once hatched. Katherine has however been a fab broody so we are going to try to help her be a good mum too. It is SO much nicer to have young poultry brought up by a parent bird rather than a heat lamp... fingers crossed for tomorrow!!!
Other events have not been quite so great. Firstly it seems we have one or more magpies stealing our chicken and turkey eggs. For a few days now we have been finding remains of eggs or NO eggs where we thought we should be finding them. Today we saw both Victoria and Camilla in their usual laying places but when we checked later there were no eggs there. And we found no less than four half eaten chicken eggs in different places around the poultry paddock. The worrying thing is that the magpie(s) seem to be entering the poultry houses and going into the actual nestboxes themselves. We are not at all sure how we can stop this... advice from fellow poultry keepers is to shoot or trap them!!
You may remember the photo of chickens queuing to lay their eggs in the egg basket in the barn (see 9th April)... Well now one of those chickens has decided to go broody IN the basket, sitting on the eggs laid in there today as well as all of yesterday's eggs, which we forgot to take up to the house last night!! She is not one of our tamest chickens and now she is broody she is able to deliver quite a vicious peck!! We need to decide what to do with her, leaving her is not really an option as we don't really want to hatch out any more of our birds and of course the chickens who usually lay in the basket won't be that impressed to find her hogging all the space... Another decision to be made...
Today the sun has shone and all nine kids have been out and about enjoying the sunshine. The photo shows Pickle's kids: Willow and Rowan catching some sleep - it is hard work being young!!! The size difference between these two is incredible but little Willow is doing fine!!