Heritage Turkeys Start Laying Eggs!

WooHoo! What a pleasant surprise! About a year ago we chose our breed of heritage turkey to be the Narragansett, for a variety of reasons (one of the best tasting, most docile, best mothers, largest toms, etc). Well yesterday I was happily surprised with another beneficial trait, they start laying eggs really soon!

Laying birds are regulated by hormones, which are regulated by light. Its nature's way of ensuring that babies are not born in very cold winters where they can't survive. So, each laying bird requires a certain amount of light per day to produce eggs. As winter approaches, day length shortens and they stop laying. With spring, days lengthen and egg production begins anew. Nice Cycle!

Well, we fully expected to not have eggs for another month or two without some help. In order to have turkey for sale for thanksgiving that are fully mature (6 months) we have to start now. So, I have been working on getting the turkey coop "lighted". We lock the hens in the coop at night, with bedding for making nests and laying boxes, food, water, and lights on a timer that come on early morning to lengthen the day for them. Works beautifully for chickens.

To my pleasant surprise, when I went in the turkey coop to start placing bedding and get it ready, I found 2 separate turkey eggs sitting quietly in the empty nesting boxes! Not one but two of the hens have just started laying, on the first of March! That implies that nature rates this breed ready to have poults (babies) by first of April, a good 30 to 60 days before other breeds. Woohoo!

It is also a nice confirmation that the hens chose to lay their first eggs inside the nesting boxes with NO encouragement and even no bedding! That validates our design and placement of the coop and nesting boxes.

The coop locked up with hens inside and ready to lay eggs!

The poor toms will be missing their girls for a few days

Inside view of the ladies quarters. You can see the nesting boxes along the front where we found two eggs.

Our plan is to coop the hens for a couple of days to get them used to the space and have them treat it as home (return here at night). Then we will start letting them out daytime's to graze and mate. That keeps the eggs fertilized, keep the hens exposed to enough light to lay well, and keeps the coop form being overloaded with the toms who would fight and make a mess of things!

Stay tuned to see how this works out. We are still debating between hatching naturally (under the hens) and incubating. Most likely we will do both. With 11 hens, each laying 2 to 3 eggs per week, by Christmas time we should have a nice supply of turkey for sale!