Goodbye Roosters

We need to say Goodbye to 4 Roosters

I have mentioned before, that we had way too many roosters… Six roosters to 4 hens is not a good ratio. It was time to process some roosters and get them in the Freezer. We kept Big Red, (AKA Smeyers) and one of the Light Sussex Roosters.

So Two Light Sussex and Two Barred Rock Roosters were headed for the freezer.

How to Process the chickens?

I’m not going to give you a step by step, nor any gross pictures. To get ready, my daughter and I watched you tube videos and bought a book on butchering.

We don’t have any specialized equipment. I put together a stainless steel table for us to work on. For killing cones, we used old traffic cones, suspended between the tractor forks, over a bucket of used shavings. For water we had a Garden Hose that we used to spray the birds and the table.

Knife issues

When we went to select our weapons, we found the kitchen knife drawer jammed shut! That had never happened before! Was it an omen???

Melissa was able to rig up a reaching tool, using masking tape and a whole whack of socket extender pieces to dislodge the stuck knife. She tried it without the tape first and the one long extender piece fell into the drawer. She had to go in from the back, from the cupboard below, as the drawer would not open at all.

The actual processing

I had to do the killing, Melissa couldn’t bring herself to do it. Then we dunked them in a pot of water being heated on the barbeque to loosen the feathers. Plucking chickens by hand is hard work! My hands still ache.

It was interesting to see that the two types of Rooster had very different feathers. The Light Sussex had thicker feathers, and also had tons of soft Downey feathers. I had had enough of plucking feathers, so I tried to skin my second bird. Skinning is also very hard work! You really have to pull hard to get the legs and wings out.

Enough details. They are in the freezer now. I am really glad we didn’t try to raise and process 20 meat birds, as we had originally planned. I think we might pay to have someone else process them next time…

We need more hens.

We were left with two roosters and 4 hens… Time to buy more hens.

Facebook groups is the place to post things like this. I Posted on an Alberta chickens and chicks group that I was looking for hens, and then had my choice of nearby birds for sale.

We have decided that we need more variety in our hen house. You can’t get to know your birds if you can’t tell them apart. So instead of buying more heritage hens, we went for interesting crosses.

I bought three hens from one local breeder. The white one is a Leghorn – she is already laying. The black one is a cross between a Jersey Giant and a Speckled Sussex. The red is a Jersey Giant and Road Island Red Cross. The are almost ready to lay.

Then I bought some more

I really wanted a couple of hens that would lay coloured eggs. So I found some Pullets that are about 2 months old. They are in their ugly duckling stage. Two of them are Easter Eggers and the smaller one is an Ayam Cemani Cross. Soon they will be beautiful, and the Easter Eggers will give us blue eggs.

We now have 10 hens and 2 Roosters for the winter. Assuming I don’t do any more shopping…