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Hun Update

On August 28, 2013 in General by spope

Since the last update in May, we have raised all 8 hatches of Hungarians. All the birds are now adults with the 8th hatch – born in late April – at 13 weeks old. We have learned a lot about raising Huns through this process. A major learning experience was how much more time consuming it was than we had anticipated. Kristin was lucky and had some great helpers though; Sarah and Trudy were extremely valuable to this project. Trudy has 8 years of experience under her belt and Sarah was excellent with raising the birds.
Hun Building
Huns start out small and fragile, which means special care needs to be taken in the initial stages of their growth. With us that means living first on raised tables with paper towels laid over the wiring, so their legs wouldn’t get stuck, with Mason jar waterers and small quail feeders all tended to manually. Between this waste and everything from the other rooms, there was a lot of dishes to do. Luckily we had an amazing helper in Brenda who would spend nearly all day just washing dishes!

Once the Huns graduated from the tableroom to the “A” room – at around 7 days – things got easier, but only slightly. The chicks needed to adjust to being on the floor with wood shavings and under grass brooders, which means it was very important that we watched them closely and kept the temperatures in the right spot. During this time we had a 4-person crew that came to help bit the birds. Bits are U-shaped pieces of plastic placed inside the bird’s mouth to prevent picking on each other. Don’t worry; they can still eat through the bits! Each hatch was bited twice, “A” bited at 18 days and “B” bited at 5 weeks.

That was all a while ago though, and we are now starting to sell the first 6 hatches, which are out in the pens, while the last two hatches will not be moved out of the “B” room until there is some pen space. Ideally this will take place by October. We started with about 60,000 birds and have done well with mortality and are excited about how well the Huns are doing in the pens. Though we were concerned initially, there was enough rain that the cover is high enough for them. The Huns have grown into fine, large mature birds that we are very proud of.



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