Tiny Turkeys

While spring lambing season has come to a close on the farm, this week it has been my turn to have baby animals! Only these have two legs instead of four.

A little over four weeks ago, we started collecting eggs from our small flock of heritage turkeys for incubating. The prolonged winter meant that our turkey hens couldn’t be out on pasture yet, so they were still in their winter coop. We piled on the fresh straw bedding to help keep the eggs clean, and we all took turns visiting the coop many times a day, whisking away the still-warm eggs under our coats.

In our walk-out basement, I set up two incubators, which hummed and rocked the large, speckled eggs gently back and forth. This mimics how the mother turkey would turn her eggs, keeping the embryo in the center and not stuck to one side of the shell. I have yet to have a hen turkey want to be a mother that didn’t either give up part way through setting (turkeys have a limited attention span) or accidentally crush the eggs. So far, it has been much safer to let the incubator do the setting, while letting the hen turkeys go about their day. Do they know that they are mothers? That’s a good question, as turkeys are…well…not the brightest birds on the farm.

Back at the incubators, the eggs are meditating in their nice, warm and moist home. Weekly, I would candle the eggs, pulling out any that were not fertile or progressing properly. As the babies inside grew, the candling (which shines a bright light on the egg so you can have a sense of what’s inside) showed the steady transformation from a clear inside to a completely dark inside except for the air sack at the top. Yolk and white were transforming into a baby turkey.

Beside the incubator station, I prepared a large shipping box with shredded newspaper and hung a red bulb heat lamp. This created a warm but dry environment for the turkey chicks to enjoy once they graduated from the incubator. The hatching process is tenuous, and I often offer some very careful help as the tiny, slimy chicks make their way into the world. They stumble and fumble, trying to figure out how those long legs and necks work. Their water-swollen infant feet are useless until their bodies draw in the excess moisture and their legs and hips gain strength to stand and walk.

For a time during this process, the turkey chicks look rather flat and round. We call this the “pancake” phase, and everyone is on alert to be part of the “pancake patrol.” Before the little ones can walk well, they can easily tip over, lying on their backs with their little feet up in the air. One sharp squeak is usually all the warning they’ll give, and often they just lay there and give up struggling. An upside-down turkey chick is on its way to being a dead turkey chick, as they can’t breathe well in this position, so it’s time to flip the pancake. That means at night too, so there’s little sleep for me during this part of hatching season.

It really is quite remarkable that any of the wild turkey chicks make it! For those first few days, these little fluff balls are so fragile. Just breaking out of the egg is a struggle at best.

My second incubator is a new one to me, and I am still learning its quirks. From that clutch, some of the chicks were covered in stickiness, which dried on crispy and hard. Hunting on Google for what could be amiss, I learned this was albumen (egg white) that hadn’t been absorbed due to too much humidity during incubation. It then dried on with too low humidity later in the process. Not all the chicks were sticky, but the few that had this problem were in a terrible fix, and I was searching for ways to help them.

One backyard poultry forum offered the advice to place the sticky chick into warm water (keeping its head out), gently massaging off the egg white. It seemed like a long shot, but one of the chicks was so sticky and miserable, I had to try something. Sure enough, the chick appeared to actually like its little Tupperware hot tub and message, and now it’s running about with the others, all fluffy and happy.

Both groups are together now in the brooder coop, pecking and sleeping and racing around. Their beady eyes are taking in their little world. It’s amazing to think that these tiny fluff balls will one day grow to be as big as their parents out in the field. One day at a time, little ones. And no more flipping over! See you down on the farm sometime.