Here’s Gimpy the turkey looking a bit happier…she’s clearly much perkier than when she came here, perhaps because I spent the day making a little rainproof yard for her where she can get sun and air but be safe from dogs.
You can see here why the breed is called “bronze”:
Photo by Teri
Next year we expect to produce all of our own milk, cheese, and eggs here on the property, in addition to a much larger portion of our fruits and veggies.
It’s also likely that we’ll raise chickens or turkeys for eating, so a while back I volunteered to help with the chicken “processing” (killing and cleaning) at a friend’s ranch, as much to take measure of my own determination as to learn the skills involved. The skills have already come in handy!
The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was perusing the local Craigslist, and found someone offering two free Bronze turkeys. They were aging (the larger domestic turkeys don’t age well), and she didn’t want to kill them herself.
The turkeys lived with chickens in a nice place just outside of Eugene. I liked the woman and felt that she cared about their welfare and was a fellow aficionado of “clean food”. These were turkeys I’d feel OK eating…well, one of them. The bigger one was a tom (male), and blind in one eye because chickens can be really mean. He was enormous and healthy, and ended up being our Thanksgiving bird. His name? Thanksgiving. That’s him at the top of the post.
The other bird…she’s a sad case. “Improved” (intensively selectively bred) turkeys become so heavy so fast that they are often crippled just by their own weight. “Gimpy” isn’t as big as Thanksgiving (who must’ve been 30 lbs), but she has a deformed right leg and can only get around with a lot of lurching and flapping. The chickens saw this weakness, and began to peck her to death. They removed maybe a quarter of her feathers and left her with a multitude of raw wounds by the time she came to live with us.
Our accidental pet turkey looks pretty unhappy in this picture taken the day she came home, but she’s perked up now.
Photo by Teri
“Gimpy” originally escaped the butcher block because she just didn’t look healthy enough to eat. But something happened; as our neighbor put it, she “seems to want to live now”, so she’s a resident here for as long as she is satisfied with her life, though determining a turkey’s quality of life is guesswork for us. Away from the hectoring hens, she’s become more bright-eyed and energetic, and every morning we transport her by wheelbarrow from the predator-proofed henhouse to a grassy pasture where she can lurch about, eating bugs and grass and frustrating the hell out of our dog by her inaccessibility.
The rest of the post will be about butchering the big male turkey, and you have to click “more” to see it. But here’s how it turned out - home-processed turkey, homemade cranberry sauce and squash from Teri, fresh baked bread, and (of course!) a pumpkin pie brought over by a dear neighbor who we shared the holiday with. Note the “store boughten” beer - something we’re working to phase out, but if you have to buy them, the Deschutes Brewery ones are all really good.
Photo by Peter
If you’re a vegetarian, you might find the rest upsetting. If you’re not…well, this is the reality of meat, and it’s far more humane and hygienic than what happened to that “free-range organic” supermarket bird you probably just ate.
Ok, that’s only partially her name. She came to live with us about two weeks ago now, and is an absolute sweetie. Doesn’t like the dog much (probably because he keeps wanting to chase her…), but the humans she loooooves. She’s all full of purrs for the littlest bit of attention.
She’s a stray, but obviously had been accustomed to being around people - the nice lady that took her in and found her a new home (ours) said she’d been begging all the neighbors for food. They tried to find her people, and finally decided that she must have belonged with the people down the street who had recently moved out - apparently they just left her. So now she lives with us.
For the first couple of days, we just called her Kitty, as that’s what the lady she had been staying with called her, and she seemed to answer to it. And being a fanatic for all things Buffy (yes, the tv show), I decided that she should be called Miss Kitty Fantastico (though she looks nothing like her Buffy-verse namesake), since having a cat named Kitty is just lame.
Then, after she’d been here for a few days (and after spending those days trying out every single name that I thought might fit her, and rejecting them all), I woke up one morning with a picture of her face in my mind, along with the name Anu.
So, Anu is now her “real” name - it seems to fit her and she seems to respond to it. But most of the time I still call her Miss Kitty Fantastico, ’cause she is.
And people wonder what we do for entertainment…
It’s that time of year; the leaves are falling, the garlic’s about to be planted, and goats are going into heat.
Most does (proper term for female goats) have about a two-day fertile period every few weeks from September - December. In other words, they have two fertile days, then three weeks off, and repeat that for several months. It can be difficult to be sure when’s the right time; in general, does in heat will “talk” more and tend to elevate and wag their tails. We noticed Drama Queen was doing all of this yesterday afternoon, and decided to test her.
How do you do that? With what’s called a “buck rag” - an old rag that’s been rubbed over the extremely fragrant body of an uncastrated male goat. I brought out the buck rag (kept carefully sealed inside a plastic container) yesterday, and Drama Queen got very excited, wagging her tail and trying to eat the container. Aberdeen seemed interested too, but less so.
Koko may have been interested, but for various reasons we’re unlikely to ever breed her.
Our good friend and goat-breeding expert from down the road came by with Valcor, a carefully selected male. We are unlikely to keep any intact males around ourselves; they are the source of that infamous “goat smell”, which largely comes from their habit of constantly urinating on themselves. They’re also bigger, fence-jumpier, and will attempt to breed with pretty much any female regardless of age or close relation.
Now we get to the how to part. It’s very complicated: put the male goat in with the females.
Here’s an instructional video:
We have a family of wild turkeys that likes to hang around our yard. They started coming last spring, momma and five babies. A month or so ago, one got run over on the highway in front of our house, where idiots whip through curves at twice the posted limit. Another disappeared some time in the past few days, but hopefully that means that the remaining three are a little smarter about cars and will pass that trait on.
I will NOT be hunting these turkeys - no gunfire allowed on our land except in case of emergency, and we like having them come around. A nearby rancher friend has invited me to hunt on his land, where wild turkeys are eating food meant for his livestock, so hopefully Thanksgiving will be extra authentic this year. I sure hope so - the “tag” required to legally harvest one turkey cost $18, and it will take me a couple of hours to de-feather and process it.
Possibly some of our city friends will be a bit appalled at the idea of taking a 12-gauge and blasting a poor innocent turkey, but my point of view is that there is no more humane, healthy, and sustainable way to procure meat. Our Thanksgiving turkey will have led a full, normal turkey life out in nature, rather than getting overfed in some stinking little cage somewhere.
This video is probably from April (2008)
