Before we moved to the farm, we spent about a year ramping up our small chicken operation. We were on a piece of land that could hold chickens and my daughter was interested in expanding out, beyond the two rabbits we currently had.
For whatever reason, I almost always prefer to incubate my fowl, as opposed to buying chicks or ducklings or what-have-you. I like the idea of being responsible for as much of the process as I can, plus I think it’s a good learning opportunity for my daughter. So, we collected eggs from my pop’s farm, from my wife’s brother’s farm and from a couple on a small homestead nearby. We went about incubating them and ended up with 11 chickens – 3 roosters and 8 hens.
The roosters began pestering the gals and this did not set well with my 8 year old. So, we harvested two of the roosters. I am not sure that our execution of this process was successful. For one, my daughter refused to eat the delicious dish with one of the roosters that we harvested. For another, we probably harvested a bit too early. The rooster that was allowed to remain with the flock began attacking both my wife and daughter whenever they came around. “Attacking” is a strong word for it, but he was definitely human aggressive.
I should have done a better job of introducing my daughter to the idea of eating our own birds. I also should have let the roosters get a bit older before deciding who to cull. These were more like what folks call cockerals. A bit more maturity may have given them more time to show us who had the best temperament.
Either way, it was a lesson-learned. These were our pioneer chickens – Puffy Cheeks, Puffy Cheeks Jr, Sue Sue, Tre Tre, Goldilocks, Hot Cocoa, Butterscotch, and xxxxxx. They made it through the move and onto the farm.