rooster retirement

Fully eighteen of our twenty-four straight-run Buckeye chicks turned out to be cockerels.  Expensive fricassee, of course, but we're over the disappointment and yesterday we culled all but three of the boys.  Now there are twenty-five quarts of canned chicken ready to go down cellar, and tomorrow there will be at least a dozen quarts of rich yellow bone broth to join them.  We hope we selected the surviving roosters well, since they will be serving our breeding flock.  With only six hens to choose from, we don't have many options for the two or three we decide to  breed, yet, ever sanguine, we hope for great things.  Next week we'll have to do it all over again with the ducks, a more difficult task since ducks are a real challenge to pluck -- it's hard to scald a waterproof bird.