Brooding Turkeys

Our turkeys are amazing fun animals.  I do not know why everyone doesn’t have one.  They are so fun – we have only had them a few months so that opinion could change. 

When we got the turkeys, Penny, one started laying eggs the first day.  The problem was she would lay them in bad places.  When she lays the egg or makes the nest she looks like she is dying.  My cats have learned to leave turkeys and chickens alone but when they are laying with their neck stretched out flopping about in the dust one of the cats couldn’t help herself and jumped on the poor hens head.  The hen walloped her and the tom then chased her away from their area for a few days.  She also placed them under trees that cannot be fenced around or under a stack of building scraps.  We would find these eggs sometimes after they had been broken but IF we found a whole one we put it in the turkey coop and hopefully she would eventually start having eggs in there. 

The other hen, Henny, started laying eggs after they had been here about 10 days, in one of the nesting boxes we put in the turkey coop.  Yay! One of my animals is behaving properly.  After she laid 17 eggs she started sitting or brooding on the eggs.  She gets up once or twice a day to eat and drink then goes back to her nest.   One thing I started noticing was Penny would sit on top of Henny for a while and push her around and then walk away.  So I did an egg count when Henny was up for a short walk and we have 24 eggs in Henny’s nest.  Penny has been putting her eggs there!  Some of those eggs will take an extra week to hatch.  I could find nothing on the internet about if the last ones that were put there will hatch.  

We moved Penny into the chicken coop, gathered up all the eggs we could find of hers and put them in a nesting box in the chicken coop.  The first night Little Palm chirped and cried for hours.  The second night we put Palm into the chicken coop too.  At first the chickens were not real happy but when the temperatures dropped down at night they moved over on their roost so they could enjoy Palm’s extra heat.  

I am working on getting a camera again but it is back ordered.