Weaning the first YB

Time sure flies! It seems as if I was marking down hatching dates and banding babies, just a few days ago and now those same babies will be weaned this weekend. The majority will be more than 20 days old. Will likely leave a few for the parents to look after for another two or three days, the later hatched ones are still a bit young. This means there should be 34 youngsters in the young bird loft by the middle of next week.

The last two days we banded 12 more in the breeding loft, that’s their second round, the first eggs were moved to the race loft. The other 8 will be banded in two days. That’s 20 more to wean off. I’ll take another round off the breeders and that’s it. The last ones should be weaned well before the first of May.

I promised 10 youngsters to a friend and will have to take 5 more to the “Dutch Touch One Loft Race“, just after the middle of this month. That will leave me enough youngsters to make up a nice race team. We can only ship 40 per week in our combine and I like to fly a full team. So if I start the young bird race season with 45 to 50 that’ll be plenty.

The weather next week is going to warm up quite a bit. I’ve built new landing boards and traps to fit into the just completed new aviaries, the nice weather next week will let me get them installed in plenty of time to allow the old birds to get used to them before the new race season begins. Won’t be long and the old birds can start their daily exercise flights around the lofts again. They have been locked up since the day they came home from their last race. No winter hawk bait here and cross my fingers but the 20 plus years we’ve lived here, we have not had a real hawk problem.

I can almost smell the new racing season!!!!  Getting anxious.