Last year I had really various hatching rates, but that was with a lot of shipped eggs. The post office can be hard on them and you’d never know it. The best hatches last year were from my own chickens and one batch that was only shipped from Oregon. This year I have my breeding birds all separated out and I’m hatching my own. I intend to sell some, but Wyandottes take so long to mature that I’m going to have to raise quite a few to adulthood in order to see if I have anything that’s worth breeding next year.

These four were all Blue Laced Red Wyandottes, and they’re very cute.

I’ll have more every Saturday until three weeks after I stop putting the eggs in the incubator. I’m collecting for Batch #5 with now.

Then on Saturday was the big Pacific Poultry Breeder’s Association show in Stockton. I’ve looked forward to this show all year. Last year was my first year attending, and it was so overwhelming. This year, I had some specific goals in mind for my shopping and I wanted to see what other people are doing with Wyandottes. Turns out, not much. There were only a few large fowl Wyandottes entered, which was disappointing. In fact, it spurred me to enter my own birds next year. I plan to start small, and will enter a show in Fresno next month, which is overwhelming in its own right.

Last year at this show, I’d put in for a raffle of some Marans hatching eggs. I was already home when I got the call that I won, and did not want to drive back up there, so I told them to reraffle them. I turned out that a lady I know won them the second time, so that was nice. So this show makes me feel lucky, and they raffle off some donated birds every year too. I bought a bunch of tickets and put them all on a trio of Blue Andalusians donated by a local breeder who has very nice birds. Then I made myself stick around for the raffle this time, and sure enough, I won them! I was very glad that I hadn’t filled up the crates I’d brought with gigantic geese.

But after the raffle, and as people were clearing out of the sales barn, I decided that I couldn’t go home with empty crates. I’d intended to buy some Pekin ducks to raise as meat birds if there were any for sale, but there weren’t. What there were, however, were some silly Runner Ducks. They were marked down and I could tell that a pair really wanted to go home with me. So they did, and they are destined to become beloved pets, not dinner. I’ll do the meat ducks a little later in the year.

I’m still working on putting better tarps over my breeding pens, which are now all full of miscellaneous critters. The ducks will eventually run loose with the rest of the flock, as this is my meat bird pen, but they’re a little shy right now. I really enjoyed the weekend spent with my hobby; they give me a lot more joy and less hassle than the hounds did, reinforcing my conviction that getting rid of them was the right thing for me to do. I miss them, but my poultry generally don’t bark, and that’s much more pleasant to live around.

Of course, when it came time for planting season in the spring, we closed the gate again. Several of my more ornery hens resented this. Clip their wings all I wanted, they were still getting into that garden. Three feet of gate is nothing for a determined one-winged chicken. Since there were only a few of them, the havoc that they could wreak was minimal. They still take one bite off of each tomato that they can reach, and make dust baths among the peppers, and I still can’t keep compost in an actual pile. And they hide their eggs too. I’d find a nest here and there under plants and have to destroy those eggs. I didn’t know how old they were, so I didn’t want to crack one open and find it rotten.

But I hadn’t found a nest for at least a month. Since the usual suspects seem to be molting, I assumed that they’d just stopped laying. Now that they’re growing their feathers back, it’s time to start doing the old Easter Egg hunt again.

Until I walked out this evening to feed them. The usual naughty hen saw me coming through the fence, and high-tailed it back to her gate. Sometimes I squirt her with the hose when I catch her in the garden. All that’s taught her is to try not to be caught. Who says you can’t train a chicken? But after she’d left, I caught movement in the compost heap out of the corner of my eye.

Was I ever surprised to see, not only another hen, but a swarm of chickies bopping around her! Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen that particular hen in a while. I’m guessing now about three weeks, as that’s what it takes to hatch an egg. She has thirteen little ones with her, and her wings are spread out to try to give them all a place to hide. They must have just hatched, as some were still damp. She was taking them for their first walk! Had I known that she was broody, I would have set some food and water out for her to get to easily. I have no idea what she was drinking, as I don’t water the garden every day, but she was probably eating compost scraps. A hen can live quite well on those.

She was very happy to have an actual feeder and waterer, and crowded her babies around to show them. I set an empty dog crate with some shavings in it near where I found her, in case she wanted to hide in it, but I found her with her brood under the old dead Christmas tree that I just hadn’t cut into pieces yet. I guess it does make a good habitat; I originally put it out for the turkeys to shelter in.

It’s all very cute, and there’s nothing to liven up a dull day like surprise chickens. I assume that she’s not the only mother; the other two Easter Eggers and the Lakenvelder hen are all known to be naughty garden-layers. And the proud papas are probably both of my mature roosters. Big Red is clearly in the lineage of most of them, but it’s possible that Murray has a baby or two also. So the chicks are all half Wyandotte of one sort or another. It will be fun to watch them grow. She seems to be a good mama.

I’m trying very hard to refrain from going out and checking on them every fifteen minutes. I’m sure she’ll be fine. And it pays to have a sloppy garden!

But he’d picked up this hound at the trap club; she’d been running around there loose for about a month, living off of handouts. He said she looked like a Walker, and looked young.

So I did a lot of thinking over the weekend, and a lot of getting more and more aggravated at Fionn. Fionn and I do not have personalities that mesh. He’s very timid and screams at anything, up to and including wearing a leash to go for a walk. I don’t really think that he’s going to work out well as a hunter, but I’ll give him a year or so. I actually have a neighbor who wants him for a pet if he doesn’t work out for me.

So what’s the harm in trying another dog? We don’t know anything about her, of course, but we’re no worse off than starting the puppies from scratch. I decided to at least bring her home and see how she interacted with the rest of the pack. I’d make a good effort to find her previous owner and if someone claimed her, I’d give her back. But in the meantime, I’d treat her like she was mine, and that means putting a bit of money into her for vaccines and spaying and whatnot.

She was very clearly friendly when I met her. Not a speck of manners in her, but I’ll teach her not to jump on people or to yank on the leash. Looking at her teeth, she’s clearly not the six months that Senior guessed at; I’d say closer to three or four years. She’s pretty thin and can do with another five pounds of meat on her bones, but she isn’t emaciated. She had a collar but no tags or tattoos. She’s been around people and other dogs, but I’m not sure if she’s ever been hunted. I can only find one scar on her body, and that doesn’t seem to be from running through brush. Their ears and front legs tend to show wear if they’ve been hunted much, and her toenails are a little long for it too. I think I might be able to feel a spay scar too.

When we loaded her into the truck, she jumped right in. I tied her up short, not knowing what she’d do on the freeway, but she just hung her ears out in the wind and grinned all the way home. She was a little unsettled being mobbed when we got to the yard, and Angus was a little growly, but that eased over pretty quickly. I stuffed her into the kennel with a big bowl of food and let them all get to know each other through the fence. Then when I had people coming over to buy my goats, I had to toss the puppies in there with her. And they were all fine! I left them together all night and nothing happened.

So we’ll give her a shot. I’m calling her Jane, for Jane Doe, as she’s anonymous. I’ve put up found ads in a couple of places, but I suspect that she was dumped. She could have been someone’s noisy pet or a terrible working dog; we don’t know. But I guess we’re about to find out if she’s worth anything. What’s one more hound? It’s better that she be put to use than to linger and die in the pound.

So we’d planned to eat them, but as plans do, things changed. We’d ended up with a pair, and those stupid birds had so much personality that I wasn’t really thrilled about the idea of killing them. They would follow me around the garden, waiting for me to pull a tomato branch down for them to pluck a hornworm from. Mr. Turks loved me especially, and always, always, puffed up and showed off for me when I went in the pen.

I had a bit of a scare with him around Christmas time, when it was already too late to process him for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner anyway. He got a massive cold, and could hardly breathe or move. I isolated him and fed him antibiotics and Gatorade by hand for ten days. Have you ever tried to force feed a turkey who doesn’t want to eat? I was a little surprised that he made it, frankly. It took him months to completely recover.

Over the last month or so, he’d got so big that he was hardly walking anywhere. Momma turkey is still fine, but Turks could barely make it between his food and his water. It was time. Since he was free of the antibiotics, I chose to slaughter him instead of just put him down and bury him. I thought it would greatly honor my giant bird to serve him for our Thanksgiving dinner. If he’d fit in the oven, that is.

Be wary; I will be posting some fairly graphic photos of the process here.

I knew I’d have to have lots of help, so Junior stuck around that day and a couple of my friends came over to watch. I’ve become a pro at killing chickens and had done a fair amount of research on slaughtering turkeys, so I had some things in mind. Of course, nothing went as planned. I’d intended to put him inside of a feed bag with the corner cut out for his head in order to restrain his wings. There’s no way my chicken cone would have been big enough. Well, I got the bag on over his head but it wouldn’t fit down past his breast, and controlling the wings was sort of the point. So we restrained one leg and I held him somewhat pinned with my own legs, and slit his throat. This process has proven to be fairly painless with the chickens, but I’d failed to account for the sheer volume of blood that a giant turkey contains. It really took him a long time to bleed out. I was not happy with that, as I’d wanted to give him a respectful death.

Once he had expired, we hung him from a ladder to finish bleeding out. It took two of us for this.

Junior weighed him for a live weight: 51 pounds. Wow, I’d guessed around 40 on the ground. Now I suspect that my hen is at least 40 pounds.

Scalding him for plucking was also a learning experience. There was no way that I could have got all of the feathers out cleanly without scalding, but of course, he didn’t fit in my pots. I thought that I’d heat a pot of water up to boiling and then cool it down to 150 in a bigger tub. But once I got that done, there clearly wasn’t enough water to submerge him. Junior had to rush and get the burner for the turkey fryer to quickly heat up another batch of water. Once that was done, turkey and water completely filled up my big blue rope bucket.

The wing feathers never did pull free easily like they’re supposed to with a good scald, but I was worried that I was starting to cook the skin. So we had us a job plucking that bad boy. It was a good thing that I had help, or I’d still be out there working on it. We had to use pliers for a lot of the feathers.

Finally then, it was on to the eviscerating. I’m fairly quick at this now and the size of the bird worked to my advantage for once. It’s a lot easier to get your hand inside a 51 pound turkey than it is a seven pound chicken. The organs were massive; the gizzard was bigger than my fist, and the heart was at least half the size of a deer’s heart. The legs at the joint had to be at least an inch across. The nuggets were exceptionally large.

There was a lot of rinsing involved to keep the carcass clean. We had to continue plucking after I’d gutted to get the rest of the feathers off. Finally though, we got to bring him into the kitchen. Set in a roasting pan, it was obvious that he was going to be too big to cook in one piece for Thanksgiving, and I did not have a clue how I was going to wrap him up to keep him from getting freezer burned until then. We weighed him again for a dressed weight of 44 pounds, which gave us a yield of over 86%, which is really outstanding. An average beef yields 62%, and my meat chickens were yielding in the high 60s to low 70s.

So we decided to part him out and deal with each bit separately. I had in mind to smoke the legs and wings, and to make two separate roasts out of the breast halves. The back, I was going to roast and use for stock like I always do. So Junior started butchering him. The legs alone filled up a mixing bowl.

But when we got to skinning out the breast to piece it out, disaster struck. Junior’s knife hit an enormous abscess, right in the middle of the breast. There was a whole lot of nasty fluid and part of the surrounding tissue was already going towards gangrene territory.

We stopped work while I googled meat inspection rules, and this turned out to be a grey area. If an abscess is localized, it’s generally considered OK to cut it out and eat the other parts. But if it’s systemic, it’s a bad idea to do that. And even though all of the internal organs and other meat looked healthy, there was no way for us to tell if the infection was in his blood stream or not. It might have been OK to eat, but it might not have.

The whole point of this meat-raising exercise is to provide healthy food for our family, so we sadly made the decision not to eat this particular bird. No wonder he wasn’t walking much; he didn’t feel good! So instead of providing us meat, he just gave us a lot of lessons. I doubt that I could have cured him of the abscess had I known about it, so it was his time to go anyway, just not for the reasons that I’d thought. I’m sick about wasting all of that effort. It took a fair amount of thought to even consider eating something that I’d named, but now I’m sorry that I didn’t get to do it. Wasting him was not my intention, but sometimes that’s just how it works out. He was a good turkey, and lived a good life longer than most Broad-Breasted Bronzes ever get to. I will do it again, but I won’t let one of these Toms live as long the next time. I’ve got 15 heritage breed turkeys coming next week, and we will eat some of those, trade some, and breed some. But 51 pounds is too much for me to handle and I don’t want to see them hurt themselves with their size again.

Foxy:

Foxy is the one that Junior picked out. I couldn’t see what he saw at six weeks, but now I can. She is most definitely the alpha bitch of the pack. Nobody messes with Foxy, and nobody is allowed to have something interesting around her if she wants it. And she always wants it.

Foxy has the busiest nose of the pack at this point. It’s always to the ground, trailing something or other. She is the most hard-headed, stubborn beastie that I’ve come across in a long time. She knows her name all right, and may deign to glance at you if you call it, but she will come to you or not on her own terms. Foxy and I are about to butt heads over this for real; they got collars yesterday and as soon as they’re used to them, the long leash will be employed. Dogs will come when I call them, no matter what.

Foxy also has the most potential to lean toward tree fighting, which will get her killed if I can’t break her of it. She’s already cut Cara up pretty badly fighting over some piece of nonsense. Tree fighters are simply not tolerated in our group.

Cara:

Cara is the extra dog. We went intending to pick two up, but Junior encouraged me to get three. We’d have a better chance of ending up with a decent hound with three to pick from, and Maverick was absolutely fine with it. He’d have sent us home with four or five if he could have. The last three females in the litter were all pretty similar to me; nothing stood out about their behaviors. So I went, “eeny, meeny, miney, mo,” and picked the one that I thought was the prettiest. Cara’s ticking and light colors remind me of the bird dogs that I grew up with.

Cara is the one that’s interested in her surroundings the most. She’s the one who always finds interesting bits to play with, which Foxy then normally takes away. Cara learned her name first, and is somewhat better about coming when she’s called. Cara is my prediction of the best hound we have simply because of Foxy’s tree fighting tendencies. She is also slightly better at treeing the housecat.

Fionn:

When I picked them up, Fionn was the last male available. He had a big wormy belly and was a little subdued about it. I didn’t have high hopes for Fionn turning out to be a decent hunter, but I didn’t want to mess with an all-female pack. The dynamics of that make me shudder to think about, so I took him just to keep things a little balanced at home.

After a good worming, Fionn’s coat got shiny again. He’s by far the most timid of the three though, and the first to go yelping away in fear if Pete the cat hisses at him. But if the other two are working, he’ll get in there and help them. He may have potential as a pack dog, but I don’t see him occupying any lead positions. He’s the most pet-like of the three, so if he doesn’t work out, I may be able to find him a loving home. The girl next door likes him a lot. But Fionn is also the barkiest one in the kennel. We’ll be working on that.

As far as training, I’m still at the level of letting them be puppies. They’ve learned their names, and not to jump on me, and sometimes they come when I call them. I intend to leash train mine, which isn’t always done with hounds, just because I may have to handle all three of them at once sometimes and it’s just too hard on me to be yanked around those mountains.

My two cats are thoroughly disgusted. Booger is slightly smarter and just vacates the premises any time the puppies are out. Pete is either dumber or meaner, but he sits in his cat bed on the table and growls at them. Of course, every time they forget he’s there, he reminds them and then they’re all baying again. If they run into him on the ground, the two females will give chase like their instincts tell them to. I never let them come into contact; for one, I don’t want my cat hurt, and for another, I think he could kick their asses. And getting their asses handed to them at this age could very well turn them off of hunting forever. This is an excellent age to ruin a good dog, and I’m going to try to avoid it.

I haven’t been laying down drag scents with them either. There are several schools of thought on that, but I don’t want them to burn out and get too used to the smells. I have a bear hide in the freezer that will be perfect for training; it’s a little too freezer-burned to be any good for anything else. For now though, they can still be puppies. I’m weaning them off of being treated like pets, which is difficult to do with the human kids involved. If they all get too attached, the dogs won’t want to leave those kids who play with them and go hunt, so I’m minimizing that now. They do need to be socialized with people and noise, so I may crate one or two up and let them be in the truck at the trapshoot tonight.

My future-predicting skills are fairly weak, and things can definitely change as they age, but I’ve got a good feeling about both Foxy and Cara. I think Cara will be the easier one to train, and she’s a hair more interested in chasing game. Fionn, I just don’t know. I’ll give him a year or two unless it’s completely obvious, but I don’t think he’s going to be anything special. But it’s a ton of fun to watch them go through the range of hound instincts, just in our own backyard. You can see light bulbs going off in their wee little knotheads now and then, and that’s very satisfying. It’s still a ton of work, but at this point, I’m still glad that I tried.

Well, OK, I’ve been thinking ahead to chickens for months now. Seamus has decided to show Silver-Laced Wyandottes for 4-H this year, with my enthusiastic support. We’re on a waiting list for some hatching eggs, but they’re slow growers, so when I saw an adult pair at the poultry show last weekend, I snapped them up. They will be the start of our show bird flock. Seamus is working on taming them, and for now, they’re isolated from the regular flock. Partly for health reasons, although they have access to each other through the cage, but mostly so they all get used to each other and the dog doesn’t eat them before the show.

But before I bought grown chickens, I went on a bit of an egg-buying spree. Junior fixed up the incubator I’d bought at the end of last season. I stuck 11 of my own eggs in it, and had some more shipped in. Cold weather is stopping some of them from coming, but I have five Blue Marans eggs, 7 Olive Eggers, and 11 Blue-Laced Red Wyandottes. I’m on a waiting list for a dozen more Silver-Laced and Blue-Laced Red each, as well as some Bourbon Red turkeys, which won’t be available for a while. and I just bid on six more Silver-Laced from a different line, and I have a dozen more Olive Eggers paid for but those hens went on strike, so who knows when those will be shipped. Oh, and I expect a shipment of 25 Freedom Ranger chicks tomorrow or next Friday. Those are meat birds; Seamus will pick two for his meat pen at the fair and the rest are for eating.

Yes, that does seem a little excessive when I lay it all out like that. The eggs won’t all hatch at the same time either, so that incubator is going to be running for months. I have a smaller one that I can use to hatch them in so I can adjust humidity levels a little better. And I have two brooders ready. I hope that’s enough. I’m going to have chickens coming out my ears pretty soon.

Don’t forget, I started last year with 30 chickens, and ended up with 11. The dog ate more than I did. He’s a bad dog, but I love him, so he gets to continue living – with the shock collar on most of the time. All that’s taught him is to not go near the chickens when both the collar is on and I can see him. I’ve had to have Seamus sneak out to catch him at it to correct him lately. But I hope to get to eat most of the meat bird batch, and at least half of the hatch will be roosters. I can’t abide a mean rooster so I’ll be eating many of them too. In fact, Yellow Rooster met his match a couple of weeks ago when he went for my face, as evidenced above.

But I enjoy the poultry a lot more than I’d expected to. I’ll have to lock them out of the garden soon, and they’ll be a hassle to keep out of it, but they’re fun. I like giving the eggs away, and I sure like homegrown chicken. I like having something to be interested in, and to take my mind off of other things.

So when I casually asked a coworker in the hall how her son had done showing his pig at the fair, I was totally just being polite. But it snowballed. Teach me to make smalltalk.

She said the pig hadn’t made the minimum weight for the livestock auction. He showed it and did well in showmanship, but wasn’t allowed to sell it at the fair. Not thinking clearly, I asked if she needed me to buy it from him. She jumped all over that.

I checked with Junior and considered splitting it with his parents. I crunched numbers and checked with the butcher for their rates. It was seeming like a better and better idea all the time. The coworker and I agreed on a price somewhere between commercial market hog prices and fair hog charity prices, and she said they’d feed it out for a few more weeks. I’d schedule the butcher truck to come the day after I picked the pig up, and with luck, I wouldn’t even have to unload it from the trailer.

But of course, Murphy had his way with us. On my way out of town on Friday, she called in a bit of a panic. The farmer who’s hosting the pig told her it needed to be off his place by Tuesday, and her son’s having surgery on Tuesday, so could we please come get it on Monday?

I frantically started calling around. The friend whose trailer I was planning to borrow was out of town for the weekend, and his gate was locked. Another mutual friend offered up his already-borrowed stock trailer, but had to check with the owner of the trailer first. Fortunately, it worked out that on Monday,  I went and got the trailer and then swung by to pick up the pig. My coworker’s boyfriend and son helped me load it, but after that, I was on my own, as Junior was at work and Seamus was at Boy Scouts.

It took me about 15 tries to get that trailer turned around in our back pen, but I got it done just before dark. The pig wasn’t terribly willing to get into the trailer, but was perfectly happy to hop out and check out her new surroundings. I had to put her in with the goats, which is good for the humility of the bigger, asshole goat.

She’s a nice pig. We’ll have to feed her out for a few more weeks, but I haven’t narrowed down a slaughter date yet anyway. She’s going to be rather spoiled in the time she has left; she likes to have her butt scratched right above her tail and she likes to lay down to nosh on treats. She’s not a greedy pig either, so I should be able to leave her with a big bowl of food for the weekends and she’ll self-regulate.

She’s certainly going to be delicious. Her loins and hams are firm and well-developed already, and I have high hopes for tasty bacon and linguica, which is a specialty Portuguese sausage that my butcher makes. We’ll treat her well, but she’s definitely not staying. A sow can grow to be 500 pounds, and that’s the last thing I need around the place. No, we’ll eat her without guilt. And if this is easier than I remembered, maybe we’ll raise one from scratch another year.

Shortly after I got ten pullets to start my chicken project, I went back to the feed store and picked up eight Rhode Island Red rooster chicks for eating. I figured that I was going through the hassle of raising chickens anyway, so I might as well just do it all at once. I chose Rhode Islands over the Cornish crosses at the feed store because I’ve heard that Cornish crosses have a hard time living. They grow so fast and have so many genetic defects that I just didn’t want to mess with them. I’ve since learned that there are other meat breeds with fewer problems, and I’ll try some of those next year.

The Rhode Islands were supposed to be a dual-purpose breed, at least according to my chicken books. Not only do they lay nice eggs, but they’re not too scrawny to be worth eating. Worth a shot, I figured.

So I raised these eight roosters, as well as two of my straight-run batch that turned out to be cockerels, one of the Buff Orpingtons and that nasty Lakenvelder. Once they hit puberty, the Lakenvelder turned mean. He was decent at protecting his flock, but he’d come after us with spurs flying, and life’s just too short to put up with rotten roosters. He was very pretty, so it took me a while to make that decision. The Rhode Islands were very people-friendly, but they were so hard on my hens and the younger chicks.

The Buff Orpington turned out to have neither of those faults, so he gets to be the rooster that lived, even though he’s got a slightly crooked beak. I’ve got four  more cockerels coming up the pike; one Mottled Houdan and three crosses between Silver Laced and Blue Laced Red Wyandottes. I plan to keep two of them too, for a total of three roosters for my flock of twelve hens. It might be too many, but I’ll have to see how they all get along.

I set up the processing station on Friday night. I’d borrowed a stand of lights so we could work both when it was cooler and when it was easier to catch the chickens. Chasing them through the chicken pen didn’t appeal to any of us, and would probably make the meat taste bad. Scooping them off the perches after they’d gone to sleep would be easier on all of us, and less traumatic to the rest of the flock.

Junior and I no longer have any weekend nights off together and I knew this would take me a while, so I was on my own.  I’ve never bird hunted, and only messed with one or two quail that he’s killed, so I was going into this completely cold.

The boys were home, and they helped. I had to give John the camera to get any useful work out of him at all, but Seamus was awesome. He helped pluck, he did most of the chicken-catching, and he did all of the gopher work. I was a little afraid that he’d be put off by it, but while he didn’t want to kill any himself, he decided at the end of the project that he’s definitely going to take poultry in 4-H next year. He says he’s going to raise hens though.

So the process itself was both messier and easier than I thought it would be. We’d catch a rooster and hang it head-down in a modified traffic cone in a sawhorse. This was to contain things like wings and blood flying. I remember my dad cutting the head off a rooster when I was a kid, and that was just sort of traumatic for everyone. Keeping it contained was a much easier death both for the bird and for us.

Next, I’d slit the throat right behind the jaw. I’ve cut myself with that particular knife and it’s so sharp that you barely feel it, and that seemed to hold true for the roosters. They hardly moved, just bled out and expired quietly. The death throes came after they were dead, but being contained like that, they were over quickly.

I’d set up our turkey fryer and a pot of water with a touch of soap in it to scald them. I tried to keep it at 140 degrees, but I did screw up on the fifth one and let it get too hot. That made it clear that we were tired, so we called it a night and did the rest on Saturday night so as not to waste any more. But swishing them around in that water for a minute or a minute and a half made those feathers come right out. I’d never plucked anything but eyebrows before, so I had no idea how difficult it would be. It was easier to get the feathers off than I’d thought but also took longer to do a whole chicken than I’d expected. It was taking us about half an hour per bird, most of that in plucking. There are plans for homemade chicken pluckers floating around the internet, and I’m going to ask Junior to build me one before we do this next year.

But finally, it was time to clean them. Most of it was fairly basic. I’ve gutted and cleaned a lot of animals in my day, so I know how. I’d forgotten to account for the teeny size of these things though, compared to, say, a bear, and I had problems in puncturing the bowels and in getting my huge man-hands up inside the bird’s cavity to clean out the guts.

I tried to save the gizzards for my father-in-law, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get them cleaned right. And I kept ripping the livers as I was gutting the birds, but I don’t know anyone who likes chicken livers anyway. But I saved the necks and the feet for stock.

Once these birds were all plucked and cleaned and ready to be cooled, it was obvious that my idea of dual-purpose birds might be based on a really old-fashioned standard of chicken. They’re pretty scrawny. But I’ll give roasting them a shot anyway and if nothing else, they’ll make outstanding stock. I do make and can a ton of chicken stock every year and I just might do a batch tonight.

For those interesting in seeing the whole set of the process, here’s a Guest Pass to the photoset on Flickr, which includes these. I kept them as family-only to keep them from popping up in my unsuspecting friends’ feeds. Let me know if it doesn’t work; it’s got the standard unprotected livestock photos in it too.

I crammed them both into the dog crate when they were weaned, and brought them home. They were born sometime in January, and I got them in March. I didn’t tame them down, thinking that if they even looked a little bit like pets, it would be hard to kill them at slaughter time. I was lucky and got the only black one my friend had – that’s not such a hot color in the show world, but it sure would look nice draped across my couch.

For a while, they were fine. The dogs were interested at first but then left them alone. I started letting them out into the dogs’ side of the yard to take care of the weeds there, and they did fine. Sure, we’d have odd moments like the time the ewe lamb somehow locked herself into the kennel, and going out to take out the trash and coming face-to-face with an alarmed sheep.

But they started demanding their breakfast earlier and earlier, along with the dawn. And on the weekends, man, did that get annoying. There was no such thing as sleeping in, even though they had plenty of hay to munch on. I’d have to find some clothes, cram my feet into my porch shoes, and stomp outside to feed those goddamn sheep. It was mostly the ewe too, not the wether, so I promised her that she’d be the first to go.

When they got big enough, life kept getting in the way. I’d initially thought that we’d have our friend the mobile slaughter-man come around and do them, but it was fair time and he was really busy. Besides, he laughed at us when we asked him. He said, “You’re hunters; there isn’t anything about this that you can’t do.”

So we made a project of it. Since the cruise was cancelled, I had room to take a day off of work, which I did last Friday. We borrowed a hand-cranked hoist from Junior’s dad that fits into the hitch receiver of the truck, since my back is still too torn up to work on the ground. I’d been feeding them near the dog kennel for a few days, thinking that on the morning of the deed, I could just feed them in there to make it easy to catch them.

But that ewe lamb was a wily beast, and she wasn’t having any of that kennel nonsense, even though she routinely went in there just to scope things out on her own. So we had ourselves a bit of a rodeo trying to catch these creatures so we could kill them, and that sure was a lesson learned. Next time, I’ll halter break whatever it is I’m raising to make it easier on all of us at killing time.

But once they were caught and I’d killed them, things went pretty smoothly. They turned out to be a little harder to skin than deer are, so it took us a little longer than we’d anticipated. By the time we got the second one bagged and ready to go, I was a little worried about the first one getting too warm. It was 105 that day, although not quite that hot yet. But we took them up to the meat locker and they were fine. I wanted the locker to cut and wrap them even though Junior and his dad do it all the time with deer because I like to have lamb bone-in and we don’t have a meat saw. Venison is just fine boned out, but little is as fine as a nice crispy bit of marrow on a lamb chop. It was well worth saving my back too, as the whole thing set me back at least a week of healing time.

When we got home, I still had the hides to deal with. I fleshed them out back with the pressure washer, which was nice to keep the heat down if nothing else. Salting them was a bit of an adventure, as deer hides don’t hold anywhere near the amount of water that wool does. I flipped them and they got dried out OK.

So when the locker called yesterday, I was thrilled. The tannery isn’t too far from them, so Seamus and I brushed the excess salt off the hides and took them in. Then we went over to the locker to pick up the meat, and I was glad I brought the big cooler. The carcasses had weighed 76 and 78 pounds, and I think I got most of that back. One of the lambs is for my mom, in trade for a painting she’s done that I fell in love with. It will probably take me more than a year to eat the other one, since I’m the only one who loves it so, but each time I do, I’ll remember them. We raised them respectfully and to be tasty, and I have no doubt that they will be.

But if we do a steer, I’m having someone come in to kill it. I am simply not capable of getting that much weight into the truck!

A fire crew was clearing weeds near one of our vacant buildings, and they looked in a window and saw this guy. Foxes in this building aren’t that unusual, but the door to his room was shut. He must have fallen in from the ceiling. Grey Fox are excellent climbers, and they sometimes use trees to get all the way to the roof of this three-story building. One of the roof access doors in broken, so they get inside and roam around.

When I got there with the snare, I slipped into the room. He hadn’t been trapped for too long, as his eyes were bright and shiny, but long enough to eat the buddy who’d been in there with him. Who knows what that one died of – the fall maybe? It hadn’t been long enough for the dead one to smell too bad either, so the live one wasn’t totally suffering.

He was curled up in a ball watching me with his beady little eyes, trying his best to appear invisible in a completely empty room with no hiding places. He looked young to me, with slight big paws. I know there’s often a litter near this building, and I suspect both foxes were this year’s spawn.

I moved slowly and slipped the noose of the snare over his head. Like a flash, he was through it. I almost caught him by the hips but I wasn’t fast enough to tighten it. He sped around the room a few times, climbing sheer walls at least as high as my head trying to get away from me.

In only a couple of minutes though, he’d settled back down in his corner. He’d been in there long enough to be a little short of energy. I moved ever so slowly and got the noose near him. He bit at it and growled, and yipped a little, but another try got it over his head.

As soon as I tightened it, he went limp. I think he was probably young enough to remember momma carrying him by the scruff, and he didn’t fight at all once I had a hold of him. I slid him out the door and out the back door of the building, which was right there. He held still while I fiddled with the faulty release spring on the snare, but once I had it loose, he was off like a shot.

A little disoriented, the last time I saw him he was headed right back to the corner of the building. I sure hope there’s a run there and he wasn’t just going back up to the roof.

I picked up what was left of the dead one and took it out of the building so it didn’t stink up the place too bad. I hid it in a hot, sunshiny area hoping that I can come back in a few months and pick up a relatively clean skull, which seemed to be intact. But if the local scavengers get it before I do, so be it. I did my part for the live one at least.