No more turkeys

Last week I spent three days, and butchered a total of eight turkeys and ten chickens. Six turkeys were mine, and two belonged to a friend. Three of the chickens were hers also; the rest belonged to another friend.

By the end of it I learned:

1) Give me heritage breed turkeys any day! Mine dressed out at between six and ten pounds. My friend's turkeys (I believe they were either mixed-breed or broad breasted bronze) started at 32 and 35 lbs, respectively, and finished at 23 and 25 lbs dressed. They were so big and so heavy that it was difficult to lift them, get them into the killing cone, scald, move them to the table, etc. For home butchering, the smaller heritage breeds are definitely easier to handle.

2) By the end of the 2nd day I figured out that plucking was much easier if I had the water much hotter than I thought I needed. Into my second year of processing birds, you'd think I'd have discovered this much sooner. If it's just under boiling, plucking is not much more difficult than scraping the feathers off with your hand. If it's not hot enough, you end up actually having to pull feathers out, pretty much individually, and it takes about three times as long. If I'd had the water hot enough all along, I could have been done in two days instead of three.

3) Butchering is hard work! By the end I was very tired, and really muscle sore from standing for so long.

I thought I was done, but as soon as my other friend's chickens were finished, I ended up pulling several roosters from my chicken coop. One was a white bird (a homeschool hatching) that was fighting with some of the others - being white, the fact that he had blood on him was very noticeable! The second was a red rooster, another homeschool hatching, that chased me every time I went into the coop. The third was one of my Ameraucanas that turned out to be a rooster instead of a hen.

With those three out, I'm down to three Dominique cockerels and one Chanticler. After last night there are now two Dominique cockerels in the coop. While doing food and water last night, I observed one of the Dominique cockerels chasing the other chickens away from the food and water and pecking the hens - not mounting them, actively attacking and chasing them away. He, too, now resides in the former turkey pen, currently dubbed the "bachelor pen." I have a friend (the one for whom I butchered seven of the chickens) who is ready to learn to butcher her own birds. They will be our practice birds. It will have to be after Thanksgiving, because my freezer is currently full.