Hobby poultry farming is like ...
Saturday was a real beautiful day for Mary Ann and me. We got a lot of things done on the farm getting ready for spring. It was especially beautiful watching all of our poultry strutting about the yard and scratching in the dirt looking for bugs and such things already this season. There were 4 Bourbon Red turkey toms strutting for their ladies with their tails all fanned out .... four white ducks like the lawn ornaments one sees sitting on city lawns only these are live but 1 hen and 3 drakes instead of 3 ducklings ... 7 guineas cackling away as they fly to the top of the barn roof to survey the barnyard ... some gray call ducks who serve duty as my mallards but really aren't ... several bunches of bantam hens with their brightly colored roosters scratching for corn kernels - cluck, cluck, cluck, here's one ... my Grams-hybrid breed of Muscovy ducks, colored but with white heads ... a flock of white roller pigeons who are more black than white but at least some of these roll ... and a partridge in a pear tree. Perhaps only a chicken farmer would enjoy these as I do. But then, hey, that's who I am. What you see is what you get !
- Letter #37, Letters to Sarah, from God, Growing in the Lord, © 1998 by Dave Grams. Used by permission
In addition to the poultry listed above, the Grams Chicken Ranch dabbles in the following other activities ...
Rabbits
Wildflowers
Wildlife habitat
By the way, we don't have a "partridge in a pear tree" but the turkeys do like to spend time in the trees next to the barn.