Red Bird, My Friend

cornish crosses

cornish crosses

I raised quite a few more birds the next year, including a few Cornish Crosses,  turkeys and ducks.

Cornish Crosses, for those of you who don't know, are your market meat birds. They're the big-breasted white birds you see packed into warehouses in those documentaries about the evils of factory farming. They reach their market weight in about three months. Which is sad really, they're just babies. But man are they tender and juicy.

I made the mistake of raising the cute little buggers with my laying hens. Most backyard laying hens are breeds that are meant to free-range. This means they're smart enough to go and peck around in the backyard and run from predators.  They still have some amount of their wild instincts that gives them a chance against stray dogs and cats, as well your hawks and other critters that might find their way into a yard.

This also means that they establish a pecking order. If you don't know where the term pecking order comes from, then you haven't watched chickens at work. If a chicken doesn't know their place in the order of things around the barnyard, they get pecked. A lot.

So, back to my Cornish crosses. So my cute little fluffy yellow chicks were put in with all the others: the red-brown Rhode Island Reds, the chipmunk-looking Ameraucanas, the black Australorps, and the pretty little laced Wyandottes. It worked fine at first. Until their feathers started coming in.

The Cornish Crosses, named Soup, Sandwich, and Sushi, were huge, nearly double the size of the others. Yet they were getting picked on. It got so bad that their poor little tail feathers were all pulled out. The thing is with Cornish crosses is that they have had all their instincts bred out of them. They literally just lay next to the food dish and eat. Even with grass and a big yard and to explore, they don't get up.

In the pecking order, this is not a sign of a healthy bird. A bird that does nothing by lay around and eat is not meant to survive. So as Soup, Sandwich and Sushi would sit there, lazily eating all day. The girls, the laying hens, busily set to pecking out their feathers. It got to the point that their little butts were pecked raw. I had to separate them. Luckily I had a separate coop. Problem was, the coop was for my tiny bantam Silkies. 

And that's my segway to talk about my beloved Silkies.