TREAD CAREFULLY THE TURKEYS ARE COMING

.. Or may be not!

ANT & DEC have spent most of their days parading around the grounds puffing out their chests, fanning their feathers and generally posing making a two second gasping sound like air escaping quickly from a tyre in between the more familiar 'turkey gobble' noises they also emit.
 The whole point of having such a grand array of feathers is to attract the female of the species but these two appear to be so obsessed with each other it's almost as though they're joined at the hip.

ANT & DEC: best friends forever?

Occasionally they fall out and embark on some awful clashes (see video at bottom of this post) but no one ever emerges as the alpha male and the spats are quickly forgotten as they resume their vanity strolls with their four females following closely behind.
 Of course now that Spring is in the air there's all sorts of other activities breaking out as the garden birds start to sing and perform in front of their female counterparts, the geese have laid eggs and while one nest has been abandoned two of the geese seem determined to produce goslings.

Turkey troubles: The ubiquitous baster!

Drawing reproduced with kind permission

of Scott Kroll from 

http://kingcrowcomics.blogspot.co.uk/

 As discrete as the geese have been in the act of mating, Ant and Dec suddenly appear to have discovered their purpose in life and have started pursuing their Bourbon Red ladies with open enthusiasm. Turkey mating is euphemistically called 'treading' to those in the know and the Stags have certainly been treading ... at every available opportunity. The female usually sits down and then the male turkey does his thing, but after observing Ant and Dec close up, they look as though they're only giving their opposite numbers a massage by foot and they look as though they're trampling and not treading. I do hope you don't see me as some sort of Peeping Tom character lurking behind the bushes watching turkeys tread but it is important to establish if the eggs that they are laying are fertilised or not. The reason for my concern is that a couple of local friends dropped by and could shed little light on the matter other than to say most turkey breeders use artificial insemination and have special breeding rooms for the purpose. The conversation suddenly gave new meaning to the ubiquitous turkey baster and I could see my grand plans to breed the best Bourbon Reds in the Borders disintegrate. I recalled reading an article about how obese turkeys were unable to mate naturally and so most mass producers employ someone in a breeding unit to "milk" the stags before inseminating the female turkeys. Yes, I know, I also want to pull out my eyeballs and scrub them clean in the shower. I have no idea how it's done and nor do I have any desire to find out, suffice to say there's a lot to be said for organic and traditional farming methods but of course it's no use keeping turkeys if they don't know how to tread!

 I asked the local gamekeeper if he'd observed any treading while wandering about (yes, these are the sort of conversations in which we country folk indulge) and he said he had, to which I then asked about technique and did he think my stags were just standing on the females or were they actually doing something. He seemed quite perplexed by my line of questioning and said "treading is treading and they were treading." Moving swiftly on I waited until another friend happened by and I told her my dilemma. She laughed and said: "Turkeys are very dull. It's all over in seconds and if you blink you'll miss it and that's probably why you've not seen anything."

 Anyway, I'm none the wiser but I guess I will just have to let Nature take its course and hope the eggs are fertile. Now the problem is the nesting boxes I've made for the turkeys are empty so far and I have a feeling any eggs have been laid outside, somewhere.

 I'm going to have to spend the next few days stalking the damned birds to find out where they're stashing their eggs and remove them to a friend of mine who has an incubator. There are just some things I'm not prepared to leave to chance!

THE THREE TENORS

But who rules the roost?

MOST hen pens have a cockerel who will control the birds and literally rule the roost. Well more by accident than design I somehow ended up with three of them when I began to collect the rare breed Scots Dumpys and while each displays quite different characteristics you can set your watch by them.

The Adhan - Islamic call to prayer

 In fact I was quite amused when scientists recently concluded that cockerels will instinctively crow at the same time every day regardless of whether they can see dawn breaking or not - this is great for me as a Muslim living in the Scottish Borders. Yes we are a bit of a rare breed too and with the nearest mosque being around 50 miles away, it is unlikely I will ever hear the call to prayer from Edinburgh. Plus most mosques in the UK are banned from allowing the call to be made unlike in most Muslim countries where a cacophony of calls to prayers known as The Adhan can reverberate across towns and cities.

 So thanks to my three cockerels I don't need to set my clock for the dawn prayer, known as Fajr which is the first of five daily prayers offered by practising Muslims. My 'three tenors' wake me up with their voluminous cock-a-doodle-doos every morning regardless of the weather.

Napoleon & Josephine

 But let's return to my feathered friends. As I say they are all quite different and the oldest is, I believe, Napoleon who came to me from Northampton with his soul mate Josephine. He was not the first rooster but he is, without doubt, the alpha male in the group and set about asserting his authority with all the hens on the day he arrived. Despite his duties as lead rooster, Napoleon and Josephine share the same cree every night and are inseparable on an evening.

 Napoleon is black and has a superb scarlet comb (the red bit on top of his head) and a magnificent pair of wattles (the two dangly bits below his chin). He often shakes his head and shows off his wattles and the whole performance is known as "tidbitting" and is designed to attract the other hens, which it does.

 This had a salutory effect on the light cuckoo-coloured rooster Horatio, hatched in a hen house in the Isle of Wight last June, who was ruler of the roost until Napoleon arrived. Poor Horatio has some catching up to do but I think the arrival of another, more senior rooster, has knocked his confidence.

 And just when he thought things couldn't get worse they did when Jumpin' Jack crashed onto the scene from leafy Cheshire. Despite being younger than Horatio he bounces around the pen on his long legs producing an annoying swagger. The perfect bred Scots Dumpy is supposed to have very short legs and a boat-like shape which almost causes it to waddle as it makes its way around, but JJ's long-legged defect doesn't seem to concern him at all.

 Not only does he spend his day ducking and diving out of the way of the other two roosters, it appears the majority of hens don't like him either and get quite aggressive when he comes a courting ... in the poultry world it's called treading! He's very pushy and has already had a downward effect on egg production because his unwanted and unwelcome attention has upset some of the hens.

 I am getting another coup built and I think that JJ will have to move out for a while to give the hens some breathing space.

 In the meantime here are my three roosters giving their best cock-a-doodle-doos for the camera - first up is JJ, followed by Horatio and last but not least Napoleon with a tidbitting demo as well. Which one do you think excels? And if you are a poultry expert any advice would be gratefully received in the interests of maintaining harmony among my chooks.