Ok due to the floods, I am getting two turkeys that will join us at the ranch tomorrow, the place where they were staying is flooded and the yard they were in now has a big wash running thru it. The owners are done with Birds, and will be giving me some chickens as well. Although the chickens are not coming for a week, still not sure why, something to do with collecting eggs so they can make babies and sell them....
So here is the issue. I have 4 areas that are caged in. The two chicken coops are seperated by chicken wire house 4 chickens in one and my 3 girls that survived the bobcat attack. Then I have two duck pens, again seperated by chicken wire that house 2 males and 2 females in each section.
I need to make room for the turkeys and am not sure who to move. Should I put the chickens all together and put the turkeys there, or should I put the ducks all together, and put the turkeys there, and move the chickens all together in anticipation of the 3 new hens and one rooster coming too?
LOL all this while I move horses tomorrow to higher ground...
Rescue Turkeys coming tomorrow.
I think there are some potential health issues with housing turkeys and chickens together...but I don't know how separate they need to be.
How big are the coops? Can one hold 7 chickens comfortably?
I am sorry, MissJestr--we are sending more rain your way......
Oh yes the coops are big enough to house that many chickens and more actually, I could move roosting spots in the little house, 4 ft by 6 foot the yards are atleast longer than a travel trailer with 4 more feet, there is one backed up to it. the yards are atleast 12 feet by 20 ft or more. The smaller one is 10 foot by 20 ft with a smaller house but would house 2 turkeys quite well. My consern is that the chickens that are coming, they peck each other and right now she put little blinders on them so I dont really want to put them with my chickens. So the ducks will have to bunk together.
All of our ducks bunk together all the time. Ducks are not like chickens in their mating habits - they don't seem to pull out feathers and hassle the females in the same way chickens do. I have never seen any of my female ducks with bald spots or that sort of thing. I would put the ducks together, put the chickens so they can interact through the chicken wire, with the idea of putting them together eventually. I find it's much easier to combine chicken flocks when I am combining multiples with multiples. LIke, I would not want to introduce a single chicken to another flock of 15. But if I introduce a flock of 4 or 5 to a flock of 15, that works much better. It's like they can't pick on everyone at once so nobody gets picked on too much.
Oh, and I would take the blinders off. That's just not fair to those birds.
any problems with putting the ducks together that I need to watch for?
I had chickens and ducks together. The ducks were four male Muscoveys . They mostly got along okay except the ducks occasionally tried to rape the hens. Also they were separated in coops at night.
The only thing I've heard of (but not seen) is that sometimes an active drake can...well....drown a female duck in his exuberance. If they mate in water, such as a kiddie pool, etc, he can sometimes push on her neck, holding her head underwater, until she drowns. Mine have not done this. But, I have read that it is possible. Mine do mate in the kiddie pool, but she keeps her head up. Sometimes they also lay eggs in the water. I don't eat those ones becaucse it's hard to tell how long they have been in the water and the porosity of the eggshell means bacteria might have gotten in there. Ugh.
Well I wont have to worry about eggs until spring, but in re reading it I dont think I wrote it correctly. I have 8 ducks total, 4 in each pen consisting of 2 males and 2 females in each pen. So will there be any problems in putting all the ducks together. 4 of them have grown up together since birth, 4 of the were rescue.
I have 13 Pekin ducks, about 8 Muscovy ducks, and a few mixed breeds, all running together with 1 Canada Goose rescue, 1 Sebastopol goose, and all my chickens. They are all together all the time. No problems. :-)
Cool then I will move them tomorrow and put the turkeys down by the ducks. Keep all the chickens together.
Ok the duck moving went great, I opened both doors they swing in to each other so I could chase them out of one and into the other. The seem to be getrting along quite well, the veggie guy gave me some produce he could not sell and I put it in there.
Then I went to town and got Thanksgiving and Christmas, (I DID NOT NAME THEM) a pair of turkeys, and Tom and a Hen, and brought them home. It took some time to get them out of the cage, they were not happy, but when they stepped in the new home, I am thinking they liked it. It is 10 times the size of the old pen they were in, and this one had fruit in it.. Will have to work on the A frame nesting box that was in there, it is open on the back side so I will close it up. Now I dont know much about turkeys, so I need to learn.
Searched all over the chicken pen for eggs, Still no eggs...
Turkeys are EASY! Food, water, a dry place to sleep and they are happy kids. I raise my chickens, turkeys and ducks all in the same huge pen with no problems.
Cool they are happy, they are next to the ducks..
Yay! Sounds like they have moved to a much better place with you MissJ!
I hope you will have some pictures to share with us soon!!
Miss J you are getting quite a poultry ranch!
Sad news to report, Thanksgiving and Christmas are no longer. A mountain lion came in and decieded he would dig down to get them. He or she did. I called a trapper who found the tracks and the cat dung. we set up 3 live traps and a camera and it is a wait and see game. He traps for the state fish and game, so it is humane and legal.
Now I will wait until Febuary and get day old's shipped and raise them by hand. Billy is crushed, he really liked them.
I am so sorry, MissJestr.
Mountain lions can be quite dangerous, not only to animals. So be careful!
Here in California and also in Colorado there have been increasing attacks on humans by mountain lions that have not been taught to fear people by their mothers. Frequently it is a young, inexperienced cat, but on several occasions it has been a mother with cubs.
I hope you are able to have it trapped safely. They are beautiful animals.
oh my word!!! How dreadful! I'm so sorry for you and Billy (and the turkeys) MissJ. What a sad end. Do they live trap them and relocate them? They are beautiful but of course very hard on livestock of any kind, including lambs and mini goats and such. How will you improve coop security before you get the day-olds? It would be awful if it happened again...
Do mountain lions hunt in the day or the night?
I am conserned for my livestock, but my first consern is for BIlly who roams the ranch with his dog. I called the trapper cause like you said Catscan, they are starting to attack humans and well Billy being a kid, I am thinking he would be a tasty snack. I know it is a fact of life, but it makes me dang mad.
The trapper takes them and I am not quite sure what they do after the catch them. I just want them caught and moved out of here.
I will secure the one small corner of the pen where they got in after the traps are gone, they placed one right where it went in. I will dig down, place chicken wire cover extending out about a foot on the ground and 2 feet up the side place dirt and rocks over the chicken wire and then put a pallet on top of that. It was the only spot that is exposed, the rest of it has big logs butted up to the cage and one side buts up to the round pen where it is covered with bed springs and tin...
MOST of all it will not deter me from getting more come late febuary and starting over. I try and keep all critters on this ranch safe, while giving Billy an experiance that he will treasure for life. He knows about the Coyotes, I have not explained the mountain lions to him yet.
I wonder why the Mountain lions out that way are starting to attack humans. Ours here run from us. We've got the pretty light colored ones & black panthers (black cougars, whatever you want to call them) They rarely take down livestock if ever. We use to feed them when i was a kid. They are very beautiful animals. They do concern me with the chickens but so far no reports of them attacking any or getting into coops. I'm just always afraid one will be sitting up in the tree watching me & startle me when i go out.
Biologists think that western mountain lions had learned to fear humans when they were widely hunted. The mother cougar would teach her young to avoid humans and everyone got along....then they banned hunting and after several generations the new inexperienced mothers didn't teach their cubs to fear people....young mountain lions would see a nice pink, defenceless human jogging down through the trees and think..."Why not?"
Since they are ambush predators, you usually never know you are being hunted till the drop on you from a tree or cliff. Their jaws are designed to sever a deer or other prey animal's cervical spine and they don't work so well on humans with big heads and shoulders and short necks. The injuries are horrific.
Also, we have moved into their natural environment. Several of the recent attacks have been people jogging on trails near new housing developments in the hills. They are even being reported in the Berkeley hills which are very heavily populated. One solution, which they use to discourage bears, would be to shoot at them with rubber bullets and worry them with dogs....just to remind them we are not easy prey.
We hear of teh attacks back here. It just sounds odd when we grew up playing in the same woods with them. They are really dangerous & I know that. I guess we just have so little problem from them that it kinda seems like a bad dream when you see the news & stories about that happening.
There is a canyon about 5 miles from here that they use to release them back in the hills for years, and as people have moved out here, they have moved closer to the people. Also I live backed up to the Cerbat Mountain range, so there are plenty of grounds for them to roam. When the critters up there get slim, they come down out of the hills looking for food. Although I have a bunch of rabbits that are wild that live around, I think they go for the easy prey, which would be a caged bird.
Thanks Catscan for the information.