Return to the Soil Forum
| Post a Follow-Up
composting dead birds
| | |
Posted by josko (My Page) on Tue, Nov 17, 09 at 11:11
I have a friend who shoots a lot of seaducks. We breast them, but leave legs, back, and skin/feathers on the carcass. I wonder if I can use the carcasses as greeens to balance a large leaf pile. I have maybe a couple dozen duck carcasses and a couple cubic yards of leaves. Should I just bury them one at a time in the leaf pile over the winter? I don't think I'll have a problem with animals, but am worried about smell, and particularly any pathogens this might introduce. I remember reading about composting chicvken carcasses in 'The Ominvore's Dilemma', and as I recall, the farm made it work.
So, has anybody tried composting bird carcasses, and if so, how many cubic feet of leaves would balance out one duck? Any other tips or hints would be welcome. |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
- Posted by ericwi Dane County WI (My Page) on
Tue, Nov 17, 09 at 11:30
| Our compost pile is mostly shredded maple leaves, which I gather up in the fall, and shred with the lawnmower. Once in a while, I will find a small animal, like a squirrel or rabbit, that has died in the yard. When I put one of these critters in the pile, under a foot or more of shredded leaves, there is never any smell released by the pile. Our pile is about 6 feet in diameter, and in the fall, about 4 feet high. We have a slow pile, because it is mostly browns, with few greens. It never gets hot, to my knowledge. In the spring, I move the pile aside with a fork, and dig out the pit below. This material will have been in the pile for about 18 months, and it will be finished compost with maybe a few stick remnants, because I routinely compost brush and sunflower stalks. I don't test for pathogens, that would be pretty expensive. We use the compost in the garden, where it helps to loosen the soil. Our native soil is high in clay content. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| The Cornell web site once had a link to a protocol set up for composting tons of dead turkeys that were killed in a flood. So somewhere out there at Cornell or Google Cache or at the wayback machine there is a protocol to be found on-line. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| If you have a bin about 4 feet across, put in a couple feet of leaves, a few carcasses, keeping them a foot away from the edge, another couple feet of leaves ... it takes a large volume of dry leaves or sawdust to keep the smell in. Sawdust works better. Montana composts deer and elk roadkill in pine sawdust. I regularly bury dead pigeons or whatever in my compost heap. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| I have visited sites around the country. Watch on video FOOD INC! Chickens now "grow out" in 8 weeks with huge, unnatural body mass, so that many cannot carry their weight and suffocate or have heart attacks. All kinds of farm animals are now added daily. That would shake up the vegetarians. In the summer, whole turkey hoses with tens of thousands of birds die due to the fans failing....windrow composting piles! WHOLE FOODS MARKETS now gather and compost their waste, but I have NO idea what goes into it. Yesterday, I visited several sites and am sure that very few have any idea what goes into their bags of compost. One used municipal sewage sludge and then sold that to nurseries. Few know that Milorganite is sewage sludge. What's in the cost bags that go into your gardens? |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
I've composted many a turkey and chicken carcass. Sometimes a bone or two shows up in the compost, I just poke those down into the soil and they "go away".
My pile is cold/slow compost. In the spring I'll flip the active pile to rest and the following spring I'll add it to the garden, no problems thus far after 3 seasons. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| Rather than worrying about the carbon balance for the birds; put the materials in the core of an already hot pile. I put skinky fish parts in the core of a 130F+ pile, and have never had a problem with smells. The fish materials dissolve within ten days. You did not mention the size of pile, but a diamater of three to five feet should be enough to retain heat. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| Well, I put 6 seaducks into the middle of a hot 4' x 4' pile, covered them with sawdust and then leaves, and am hoping they don't stink up the yard. I tried this once with fish, but I guess a ~60'lb chunk of shark meat was too much for the pile, 'cause it stunk up the neighborhood to high heaven; bad enough so I haven't tried it again. I get a lot of fish scraps, too, and after the shark 'incident' haven't dared compost them, but I'd appreciate any hints on how to do it without odors. During the fishing season, I typically end up with ~10 gals of fish scraps/week. Right now I use most of that for lobster bait, but I have been eying them as a source of nitrogen during fall leaves season. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| Trench compost the fish right in the garden, I have done it for years. I started it to get rid of the stink as our garbage pick up is only once a week and I didn't like the scraps taking up freezer space. Just plant deep between rows in season or anywhere out of season. growing season that is not fishing season.Your worms will work them over in a month or less.I have not found a plant yet that has trouble with high nitrogen from this.Hint no fifty Lb.hunks of shark please!!! Curt :-)
P.S. on second thought if you have room toss in the shark. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
Josko -
60 pounds of shark, cut into smaller chunks and layered in with a lot of sawdust would not stink. The trick is covering it up with plenty of sawdust or dry leaves (a foot or more). Pine sawdust works really well. As for the fish, either get a lot of sawdust or do as the other person suggested and trench compost it right into the garden. We used to trench fish scraps into the garden in MT and had no problems. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
60# is a heckuva lot of shark!
Must have been a pretty big hunk. I'd say you'd want 3-5x as much sawdust by VOLUME to cover it without stink. Leaves you'd need more like 10X by volume... |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| Josko, Your 4 x 4 pile can handle about 30 lbs of bird. The leave should suffice if the center of the pile is employed with birds placed in layers. Some saw dust or straw underlay (1 part) and manure (2 parts) atop is a standard layering with mortalities on a farm. A Static pile is customary and only turned twice, perhaps after 3-4 months per turning. The birds should be undistinguishable in as little as two weeks. Larger animals logically need a larger pile or fascility and can take up to a year for decomposition. I will not relate the process but you can google "mortality composting" for text or video. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| They've composted whole WHALES with no serious smell and the time period I'm given to understand is quite short. I don't think the size of the animal has much to do with it. The details on which I base that opinion are gross so I'll spare you... ;) |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| In the late 90's, there was a poultry PHd who started a poultry operation raising roosters for their hackles. The business was near Olathe CO I believe. He would regularly harvest a rather large number of birds (over 100 I vaguely recall), get the hackles and compost the carcasses with the saved rooster manure. He would lay down a layer of manure, then birds, then manure, birds and so on. In short order the pile was done and there was only the occasional speck of bone. BTW, the rooster manure analyzed at 8% TKN-N. His explanation for the high N was that roosters don't produce urea (volatile) in their poop while hens do. Boy do I wish I had a rooster operation near me!!! Michael |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| Compost generally smothers/absorbes odors pretty well. I have composted whole deer carcases and skunks under about a foot of material with very little odor. It probably depends alot on the composition of the compost though. Mine is wood chip based so the high amount of lingin products may act like activated charcoal moreso than other materials. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| With descent quantities of sawdust you can compost almost any high N source with little or no smell. Back when I was first looking into composting I found pages on how to safely dispose of whole diseased cow carcasses with nothing but a few yards of saw dust, a front loader or a lot of elbow grease, and a couple months time. Basically bury a large animal in a large pile of sawdust wait a month, turn, wait another month and viola. Nothing left but some bone scraps and disease free compost are left. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
| The first set worked out better than I thought. I set out two layers of 6 birds each, covered with jointer shavings, into the middle of a ~110F active compost pile, and covered all with ~12" of composting leaves. Other than a slight barnyard (ammonia???) odor when the pile was perturbed, I couldn't smell a thing. Less than two weeks later, one can make out some bones and feathers, but the rest is a compost-looking black 'stuff'. The pile went up to ~125F a day after I added the birds and was at 115 this morning. (~50F avg air temp). So I'd say it worked out very well. A new dozen birds were set out this morning. |
RE: composting dead birds
| | |
- Posted by pt03 3 Southern Manitoba (My Page) on
Fri, Nov 27, 09 at 18:14
| Yup, you start out with your small birds, mice or rats and you think they're great... and they are, they are terrific. But pretty soon, a bird isn't enough. You're out on the street trying to score a racoon or maybe a possum. And the next thing you know, you're strung out on deer or some other ungulate and you begin to ask yourself "what's next" and you have to ask for professional help. That's serious. :-) Lloyd |
|
|
|
|
