What Will We Do With All These Chickens?

Last Saturday, the eggs began to hatch. Not my eggs, but a bunch of chicken eggs we had in our incubator.

We had started with 41 eggs incubating. Three of them didn’t develop (as shown by candling), leaving us with 38 eggs to take to full term. In the end, 32 hatched. Of the rest, two died during hatching and four never pipped.

We now have 32 chickens.

Of our new flock, 31 chicks seem happy and healthy. One, that we’ve named Forrest, has leg problems called spraddling. Luckily, spraddling can be corrected with a well-placed band-aid. Forrest is doing much better now.

Then comes the eight-million-dollar question: What are we going to do with all these chickens?

We hope that most are pullets (hens). We enjoy all the eggs we’ve been getting from our current flock. And the birds are fun and social. Some of these chicks are clearly from hens that we’ve subsequently lost to predation. It’s nice to have them to remember some of our favorite birds by.

Alas, at least some are males. In fact, odds are that half of them are males. We certainly don’t need sixteen roosters.

So? What will we do with sixteen roosters? The rooster we have right now is a great bird. He’s not that aggressive and is a good defender of the flock. This is in opposition to another rooster we once had. We finally had to get rid of him because he was attacking us. He made great soup.

The sad reality is that any excess roosters we have will likely follow the same fate. We’ll try to find homes for some, but roosters tend to be a bit aggressive (even if they do have the same disposition of our current rooster), and having more than one can cause lots of fighting, and can be hard on the hens. One or two (or maybe three) is more than enough.

I’m not crazy about slaughtering chickens, but it’s a necessary reality. I see a lot of chicken tortilla soup in our future. (Got any recipes?)

So, the answer to the question: What will we do with all these chickens? We’ll love them and raise them. We’re hoping for lots of hens so we can have lots of eggs. If we can find homes for the excess roosters we will. If not, well, we’ll have to take care of that.