Roosters and hens

Ever since mid-December when we battened down the hatches for some high winds and snow, we've had six young roosters tucked into an inside cage in the chicken coop.

Since we used the incubator to hatch two batches of chicks last summer, the young roosters have been gradually coming "online." For the last few weeks these boys had been wreaking havoc on the ladies, so life was much happier for the hens with these randy fellows out of reach. Nonetheless it was past time to put these boys in the freezer.

So early Wednesday morning when it was barely light, Don and I bundled them into boxes padded with a bit of straw, and I drove them to the butchers. On the way I collected two extra roosters from a neighbor who had a surplus.

The butchers are located at the top -- and I mean the TOP -- of this range.

It's four-wheel-drive conditions this time of year.

But once I crested the hill and got to the flat on top...

...I'm greeted by one of prettiest little farms in the region. Sure wouldn't mind owning this place!

I drove a mile or so more until I came to the butchers. They had everything set up.

The orange items are killing cones, the barrel beneath it catches the blood.

We offloaded the boxes. Bye bye boys!

While the butchers were doing their dirty deeds, I drove back into town to do some errands and wait for their call. I passed a bunch of bald eagles perched in trees by the river.

Way cool birds.

This probably isn't an eagle's nest, it looks more like an osprey's nest.

Anyway, the boys came home in a lot smaller of a box than the one they went in.

Now they live in our freezer.

After some discussion, we decided to keep our older rooster Snap. He's a good rooster, tame with us and not hard on the hens (some roosters are vicious to the ladies).

We also decided to keep this young fellow, one of Smoky's bandits (in the middle).

This is what he looked like as a chick.

We haven't named him yet, but he seems very good-tempered (unlike the randy bunch we just sent to the freezer). Although we hatched him ourselves, his egg came from a friend who raises purebred Delaware chickens, which are considered a rare breed. They're beautiful birds and lay large brown eggs. This boy is also totally unrelated to any of the ladies, so he's a good one to keep.

With the surplus roosters gone, it was time to muck out the chicken coop again.

Smoky settled down to watch me. This bird is truly endearing. No wonder she made such a good mama.

After a couple hours of hard work, the coop was clean and lined with fresh hay...

...just in time for the birds to start settling in for the night.

Yep, back to normal in the chicken coop.

Looking meat in the eye

About ten years ago when we still lived in Oregon, we were faced with butchering a steer for the first time. And I do mean this was our first time. A friend put into words what I was privately wondering myself: would we be able to eat the meat? We had raised that steer from infancy. How could we eat him after looking him in the eye for two years?

In fact, this friend made a joking wager that we wouldn't be able to eat him. I won the wager when she and her husband invited us for dinner one evening and we brought the steaks. (They were delicious.)

This issue sparked a half-humorous piece I once wrote called The Cuteness Factor. But all joking aside, the issue of eating what you raise is actually quite a serious one. It's one thing to be brought up on a farm, dealing with the realities of butchering on a regular basis. But for those embarking on country living after a lifetime shopping at conventional grocery stores, it's not an easy issue to overcome. If you're striving for greater self-sufficiency, eating one's own livestock is something that must be faced.


This was brought home by an email I received this morning from a gentleman named Christopher. This fellow had written before with some basic questions on chickens, and in response I put up a blog post on chicken basics. Christopher has made tremendous progress in the livestock end of things, but still had an additional question as follows:

You may remember me from an email last year that you wrote an article about. I very much appreciated your wisdom, and I have since made your blog a daily read. By the way, thanks to your advice, my wife and I currently have approximately 40 chickens and 13 ducks in varying ages, and we get about a dozen eggs a day. We also have 24 goats and a horse.

I find myself in another situation that I want to ask your advice on, regarding chickens. Well, specifically, roosters. When we realized back in November that we had too many, I took 11 of them over to a friend's house and "processed" them. I left my house with 11 roosters in a tub, came back with 11 freezer bags. Well, because my wife and daughters had raised the roosters from chicks, they couldn't eat the roosters. They still sit in my freezer.

How do you overcome this, um, hurdle? Please keep in mind that while some were brought up doing this and accept it as normal, we were not. We are trying to get there, but it isn't happening very quickly. My wife loves chicken, but she says that when she sees it in the plastic container in the market, she didn't ever look it in the eyes and feed it, watch it grow, that sort of thing.

I would like to open this up for discussion among readers. How DO you overcome the "squeam" factor? How do you eat something you've looked in the eye?

Along with Christopher and his family, there are undoubtedly countless others who have the same issues, but who are striving for independence (which includes raising livestock).

So let's give Christopher your best shot. How do you overcome the squeam factor?

Butchering chickens

Remember all those darling little fluffball chicks we got last March?

Well, the yellow chicks were Cornish Crosses, a hybrid fast-growing meat bird. While normal chickens dawdle along in growth and finally reach their full size around six months, by three months the Cornish Crosses are massive and more than ready to be butchered.

So yesterday was the day to bring them in to the butchers. We've butchered chickesn in the past but frankly aren't very good at it, and for $2.50 a bird it's hardly worth the effort of doing it ourselves.

But how to transport them? After thinking through all the options (and finding them unacceptable), I hit upon the idea of using our manure sled. So I folded down the seats in the car, put the sled inside, and padded it with hay.

At this age, Cornish Crosses are in the huge freaky mutant stage, so I knew it was unlikely they could even hoist themselves out of the low sled. Turns out I was right. They teetered and flapped a bit until they learned they could lie down and not get tossed around by the car. But there was one guy who kept flopping around until you could almost hear the other chickens yelling, "Shaddup and siddown!"

It was a gray and rainy day. Believe it or not, this is the lake. If you look really really hard, you can see the faint outline of the not-too-distant hills on the far shore.

On the drive, I passed this green field dotted with turkeys in courtship mode:

At the butchers (a family-run business), they were ready and waiting. They put the birds in a cage. The orange cone on the left (a cut-down traffic cone, evidently) is the killing cone, where the bird is inserted upside down and decapitated; the hot pot of water in the center is for soaking the feathers to make plucking easier.

Here is the facility where they clean and cut up chickens, as well as other livestock or game their customers might bring in. Squeaky clean.

The birds would have been ready within a couple of hours (they have to be cooled before they can be wrapped), but I told them I wouldn't be back in town until Thursday so they'll freeze them for me instead.

On the way home I passed this gorgeous farm. I wish we lived there!

The drive took me past some amazing sights. Those rocks are cliffs dropping straight down into a gorge. The pipe in the center bottom drains water from the ditch on the other side of the road over the cliff.

Here is the steep hillside over the cliffs pictured above:

Anyway, that's it on the chickens. They'll be in our freezer on Thursday.

Huge weird freaky mutant chickens

I've had an unbelievably busy two days. Yesterday we spent the entire bloody day housecleaning and yard cleaning because we had somewhat unexpected houseguests coming in, not to mention it was our turn to host our weekly neighborhood potluck.

Then this morning I got up at 4:30 am to file my column with WND, then left at 5:30 am to get to Coeur d'Alene in time to drive my parents to the airport, since they're flying home after a two month visit (they'll be back in October). After that, a zillion errands in the city, then home to do some work here, then in the afternoon I went to a nearby town where a fellow has a business doing custom butchering.

I brought in our eight meat birds because it was time to butcher these babies. They were at the stage where they could hardly walk (I call it the "huge weird freaky mutant" stage), so that meant it was time to put them in the freezer. Last year I had to bring the chickens to a town two hours away to get them butchered. This year it was much closer.

The box to transport the chickens.


Ready to go?


Not sure about this...

Butchering day for chickens

Today was butchering day for our fourteen Cornish-cross chickens.

Cornish-crosses, for those who don’t know, are meat birds. They gain weight with a speed and seriousness awesome to behold. While the rest of our chicks were growing at a regular rate, our Cornish-crosses were doubling and tripling in size. They were always gathered at the feed trough, gobbling food as fast as possible and converting it into meat. They were not quite two months old (born May 20) on their butchering day.

Sorry the photos aren’t the clearest – they kept moving. But these birds are the same age. Obviously the meat birds are the white ones.





They started out as cute little yellow balls of fluff, and soon metamorphosed into huge weird freaky mutant chickens nearly incapable of standing on their own two legs. Literally. In fact, one bird dislocated both her legs last week. They simply buckled under her own weight. It was grotesque.

We had plans to butcher the flock at the end of August, when we had a breather in our schedule. Both Don and I are inept enough at butchering that we both needed to be involved. But when this chicken dislocated her legs and resorted to flopping around the coop, we knew we had to butcher them sooner as an act of mercy. Unfortunately we’re in the throes of our busy season, and two back-to-back business trips meant we had to postpone butchering until early August at the soonest.

So we got wind of a lady who does chicken butchering, and I finally was able to track her down. She is located in Athol, nearly a two-hour drive north, and she said she could squeeze me in on Saturday morning if I could be there by 9 am.

So this morning I got up at 4:30, drank a cup of tea, caught up on the internet news, milked the cow, did the barn chores, and by 6:45 am had the huge weird freaky mutant chickens stuffed in a cage (with overflow chickens in a box) in the car.

Driving for nearly two hours with fourteen huge weird freaky mutant chickens in the car isn’t a whole lotta fun, but I got to this lady’s house (well, barn) and she had the dirty deed done in just a little over an hour. I wished I’d had the camera so I could document all the steps for you, my loyal readers. Then again, maybe it’s good I didn’t have the camera after all.

Some might argue that we whimped out by not butchering the chickens ourselves. On the other hand, this lady charged – drum roll, please – a whopping $2.25 per bird to butcher, and had all fourteen done in about 1.25 hours. Left to our inept hands, it would have taken my husband and me all day to butcher fourteen huge weird freaky mutant chickens. So despite the long drive, I consider it time and money well spent. Now we have fourteen fat birds in the freezer, ranging from 5.5 to 6.5 lbs each.

But if you wanted to insist that we whimped out on butchering, I probably wouldn’t argue too much. Not my favorite thing to do, butchering chickens. Though, let the record show, I can do it.