One of the joys of raising animals is really getting to know them in terms of behaviors and sounds. Roosters, on the one hand do crow with a sound that hovers in the ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ range. Even when the roosters are just starting to feel their oats (or, their hormones), they can make a weak version of this, but crowing it is.
We’re brand new to turkey raising this year and it has been truly delightful to find out that turkeys make a bunch of different noises. But, none of them sounds like ‘gobble’. What I think that refers to is more like a ululation. ululation
They also cluck and make a noise that sounds a lot like a ‘ping’ – sort of a “Star Wars’ sort of noise. Again, I have no idea who’s doing what (supposedly the tom’s ‘gobble’ and the hens ‘cluck’ but I think they all ‘ping’.
As you can see, they look a LOT more like turkeys than the last time we took a look at them for you and they are starting to puff up and present ‘display behaviors’ a lot more now. But we have the rest of the summer and into the fall before they will be big enough to be recognizable ‘painted on a china plate’ turkeys.
A lot of people would like to raise some sort of livestock – whether it’s chickens or pigs or lambs or whatever – but they are stopped by lack of experience and fear. Actually, raising animals is pretty simple (not necessarily easy – which is a whole different deal):
So, you are thinking about raising sheep. Or, maybe it’s goats. It’s probably NOT cattle because just the thought of raising a cow or a beef animal is so daunting – we’re talking a creature that ends up weighing almost as much as a small car. 
And in our last chicken-y episode, the hens had started to do their egg-thing and life seemed to be going along beautifully. We get more eggs now on a daily basis and they are bigger eggs too, though every once in a while, we get a ‘peewee’ one.
We also put in a wall to make the space that we will be using for the chickens smaller (so that they are not trying to heat up the entire back of the barn with their body heat – they will stay warmer this way). These chickens are Light Brahmas 
Ordinarily, we’d just put on the shutters, but we saw some interesting pictures of chickens in the snow and it gave us the idea that perhaps the birds would, on nice sunny days (and we get those starting in January), like to ‘take the air’ as they used to say. We plan to use some scrap lumber and old windows to make a 3-sided ‘sunporch’. We’ll open the shutter (it’s hinged at the top), snuggle the ‘sunporch’ up against the outside wall of the barn, put the shutter down across the top and hook it down to the outside of the ‘sunporch’. But, let’s say that we just want to give them some fresh air? The DH came up with some screens that just fit into the window openings. If all we want is fresh air, then we can open up the shutters. If we want to use the ‘sunporch’ then, we’ll take out the screens from the inside of the windows and shoo the chickens out into the sun. 
We’ll be able to do a bit of cleaning in their living space (always a job done much better and more ‘pleasantly’ in the winter rather than in the spring when the weather – and the manure – warms up) and get them some fresh air and sun at the same time. Win-win.
Chickens are the ‘gateway drug’ of livestock raising: People who have no experience with farming see them as cute, easy to care for, safe to be around, non-toxic and benign.
