Qurna update. December 2015.

We had some good news this morning! Our turkeys are finally hatching! We are so excited as this is our first experience of turkeys and their offspring! We also have a goose sitting on her eggs so hopefully soon we will have little goslings running around too!!!

There are more eggs ‘pipping’ too, so hopefully we will have around 9 or 10. The turkey mother is also sitting on chicken’s eggs and a couple of Pekin duck eggs and we were also give a few ‘ready to hatch’ Muscovy’ eggs by Nagat, Omar’s older sister, who is lovely!! They all hatched last week and are now under the lamp in a box in the hatching room. Omar built a couple of Hassan Fathy-style ‘sitting-quarters’- for the birds, so that they can lay, and hatch, in safety. They love them!!! There’s even room on top for another storey! So, in good Egyptian fashion, we will have multi-storied turkey housing! 

The first egg was laid around a month ago, followed, pretty much every day by another and then another, until she had quite a number in her nest. Naturally a few duck eggs and hen’s eggs were added for good measure. We have two turkey hens and both were laying at the same time, in the same place! But one was finished laying so she decided to sit on them.

Turkey eggs are narrower at one end and quite speckled and usually take around 28 days from the start of sitting to hatching.

We originally bought 4 turkey poults from the guy who comes every week on his truck. He sells lots of different types of birds, but they are not always in the best shape! Out of the four only one was male and he was the first one to die. We don’t know of what, but Turkey’s tend to be quite sensitive birds and get infections easily. Then there were three! Omar bought another male at the souk but it was too young so he bought another one for 200LE. A lot of money!!! He was an adult male and managed to fertilise a few eggs before he too ‘bought it’! The young male was now mature enough, and judging by his offspring was certainly up to the job!!!

Omar went to check on the eggs and the little ducklings which hatched from Nagat’s eggs, and which Omar had put under the turkey a few days before they were due to hatch, were communicating with the unhatched turkey chicks! The ducks are in a separate box under a lamp! Omar had left them for a day with the Turkey, but didn’t want the turkey to think that she could get off the remaining eggs, so we decided to put them in a box beside the turkey’s nest so that they could still hear them.

We want to leave the turkey chicks with the mother but Omar is going to keep his eye on them, as there are still eggs underneath her. They may end up in the box with the ducklings, so that the ducklings can teach the chicks how to eat. But we want them to gain the immunity from disease that staying with their mother gives them, so hopefully they will be OK. The ducklings are also allowed out into the house so that they to are exposed to bacteria and when the eggs have all hatched they can hopefully run with the turkey chicks. That’s the plan anyway!!!

Winter is usually the best month for turkeys here as it is not too hot for them, so hopefully by the end of the season we will have more turkeys than we know what to do with, although I think a couple of them will go to Nagat!!! I do love the turkeys and their noises but they are very bossy birds and tend to push all of the other birds out of the way when it comes to feeding time, so Omar now feeds them all in different locations. They also sell for a lot of money, so if we can get them past the danger point, which is usually about three months old, then we can sell them.

All of our birds live together, geese, chickens, turkeys and ducks and seem to manage well enough. Shame the people of different races can’t manage to do it as well as they do!