Big Island Chickens

 Processing Day and More Sheep!  Today is December 23 so todays post is a few days old, well, not quite a week since we processed the  chickens out of the flock. We also have more sheep but more on that later.  Processing day was on the 18th, a Saturday and since we were taking the birds off to a friends to make a day of processing both our and her birds, AND she has a working feather plucker, we loaded up our 19 hens and the 2 roos we decided to cull. Our current flock is in it's third year of hens with a very few that were in their 5th year. With this years particularly hard molt (nation wide if you gauge it by the general tone on the chicken forums online) that saw egg production go from 25 eggs a day to actually zero and the high number of older chickens in the flock we decided a hard cull was in order, saving only the youngest in case they start up again in Spring. That means we are keeping the golden comet hens that have been the dominant layers for us this year, accounting f

 Feeder Results The girls are using the feeder well, of course the goats are wanting to climb into it. Sheep have no such inclination. As long as they can eat, they are happy munching outside the feeder.   As for the chickens, they too tend to hop up and into the feeder. We do feed alfalfa pellets and some occasional grain for the goats and the sheep so they are looking for the left overs that get missed.  Though this is a Chicken Blog, right now we are focusing on our meat flock of goats and sheep. Today's concern is setting up appointments for seeing candidates for two new additions of sheep ewes. We have two farms we are looking to set up go see's for tomorrow. Both on the north end of the Island. WE want Dorper's, but most breeders are ranging their herds so inter breeding and crosses are really all we are going to find here. Still, they are hardy and reasonable fast growers if crossed with Katahdins.  We fell in love with a few on Craig's List that showed black ag