Blagger » Keeping chickens

The nasty death of a naughty chicken

Nik — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:54:10 +0000

If you ever thought keeping chickens was an idyllic life of waking to their gently clucking and collecting fresh eggs for breakfast – and nothing more – then think again.

Chickens are well-known cannibals. If any other bird in the flock has a prolapse and you don’t get to it quick enough they’ll peck at the dangling flesh and pull out the injured chicken’s insides, killing it in a most horrible manner.

Fortunately we’ve always managed to catch and quarantine any of our hens when they’ve prolapsed to prevent that, but we didn’t manage to save poor Gregory from a similar fate.

She was the bully of the flock, who used to pluck the feathers of her sisters. For the last couple of months, though, she’s been very quiet and withdrawn, keeping herself to herself and pecking nobody. She’s been slowing down, and spending a lot of time sleeping.

Today she clearly slowed down too much, and the other hens either decided she was dead already, and therefore fair game, or made up their minds to get their own back.

We got back from a quick drink to find her wedged at the back of the pen, stuck between the wheels of the coop and the mesh of their compound, bloody and badly pecked.

A whole slice of skin was missing and we both assumed that she must have been dead, so we got a bin bag and our gardening gloves and moved the coop to retrieve her. As we did, though, she moved her head and breathed very weakly.

We put her in quarantine but, as we suspected, she quickly died. We gathered her up in the morning, and she was hard.

She looked very peaceful, poor thing. My only hope is that now that she’s gone the flock will calm down.

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Curing the pecking hens

Nik — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:11:53 +0000

The chickens have had a tough few months. They’ve taken to pecking each other – not in the friendly, gentle way they do when they’re mutually grooming, but in a quite vicious manner. Some of them have lost a serious number of feathers and are starting to get sunburned.

There’s a ringleader – one of the youngest hens – which has subsequently lost the most feathers as her sisters turn around and peck back whenever she pulls out one of their feathers.

If it was just a bit of naughtiness I think we could put up with it, but since they’ve learned that they can all eat the feathers then pull out of each other it’s turning into mild cannibalism.

So we’ve bought Stockholm Tar. The tub warns that it’s thick, black and very sticky, and we’ve read elsewhere that if you get it on your clothes or hands you’ll have a job getting it off again.

The idea is to paint it onto your chickens’ bare bits and it stops the others from pecking them any more. I can’t imagine they’ll enjoy it much, though. Every time they dust bathe they’ll get the dirty stuck to their bums. In the meantime, then, we’re dosing them up with copious quantities of poultry spice in the hope it calms them down.

So far it seems to be doing the trick.

We’re still going to have to give them some sun block, though.

Stockholm Tar

We return from holiday to find Hitler Hen has died

Nik — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 12:31:09 +0000

Back from a week away, we find we’re another chicken down. Hitler Hen, who used to stride around the compound kicking her heels up high like she was goose-stepping, passes away in our absence.

In fairness it wasn’t a great surprise. She was looking a little puffy, as chickens seem to do when they start feeling ill, the morning we left. By Tuesday she was worse for wear and was shivering in the nest box, according to our neighbours.

They lifted her out and put her in a cardboard box in their garage, bundled up under a blanket with a hot water bottle. We really couldn’t have asked for better chicken sitters than them. By the evening, though, she was gone, and so they’ve bagged her up and dropped her in the bin, poor thing.

So now we’re down to six chickens, one of which is back in the chicken hospital. Big Bertha, who is a bit of a bully, has prolapsed for the second time. Remarkably, despite this she’s still laying eggs, but she’s very distressed (as you would be) and not at all as brave as her bulky form would suggest.

We’ve put her in the cat kennel with pellets and water and are treating her with Germoloids twice a day to reduce the swelling. With any luck she’ll be back in with the rest of the flock by the end of the week. She’ll no doubt be glad of that as it must be very boring in quarantine.

Poor chickens. The Rhode Rangers have had a tough time so far – both first and second batches – and they don’t seem nearly as hardy as our first three hens, of which two are still going strong.

I don’t think we’d invest in that breed again. Not when these ones have gone, anyway.

Gabby the chicken heads for the coop in the clouds

Nik — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:18:15 +0000

Oh dear. It’s been a tough winter for our chickens. First the two that had the prolapse, then one of their sisters turning into a pecking bully, happily going around pulling out the other chickens’ feathers. Now a death in the family.

Gabby, our favourite of all the chickens, has gone. She was only a year old, but endeared herself to us as soon as she arrived. She had a squinty eye that made her look at you with her head cocked to one side, and rather than cluck she used to do little honks.

She started the day – Monday – looking far from happy. She was all puffed up and, like Barbara was when she got like that shortly before she died, she stood stock still and kept on closing her eyes, like she was falling asleep.

She spent the first half of the day pressed up against the side of the compound, and didn’t seem to notice the rain lashing down on her. She just stood there, as though she was asleep, and only moved when the ferocious pecking of the bully knocked her sideways. We went out to rescue her, and turned her upside down to check her bum (a dirty bum is one sign your chicken is on the way out). As we did, a stream of white liquid flowed out of her mouth and onto the chippings. The other hens quickly pecked it up.

We put her in the cat kennel we use as a chicken hospital and quarantine hut and left her in peace, not sure how much longer she’d have.

The answer, it turned out, was ‘not that long’.

As the sun went down and we went out to shut them up we lifted the lid of the kennel and found her lying on her side, her eyes closed and a little trickle of liquid running from her beak.

She was dead.

Poor thing. It’s wrong to feel sad for a chicken, isn’t it. Especially as one of the reasons for buying so many that look the same is that we didn’t want to be able to tell them apart so that when this kind of thing happened (or we needed to slaughter them because they’d got to the end of their laying lives) we could, without too much trouble.

There wasn’t much we could do with her. We couldn’t bury her in the plot for fear the foxes would dig her up, and we don’t have an incinerator, so we put her inside two tied-up bin bags and dropped her in the wheelie bin to await collection.

I’ve felt guilty all week, every time I’ve dropped in any waste on top of her.

The smallest egg we’ve ever seen

Nik — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:07:50 +0000

One of our chickens has laid the smallest egg either of us has ever seen. I doubt it ever felt it fall out. It’s barely larger than the end of your thumb, and I’m surprised Rich found it when he was out their collecting the morning’s layings.

It weighs almost nothing, and is barely any larger than a pound coin.

Small egg and a one-pound coin

How could we resist cracking it open to see how small the yolk might be? Not us.

And as it turned out, the yolk was very small indeed.

Tiny yolk inside a very small egg

Another chicken pops out… from behind

Nik — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 15:54:19 +0000

No sooner had we cured one chicken of its prolapsed bum and felt rather proud of ourselves for reintroducing her to the flock than another one succumbed to the same fate. This one wasn’t so easy to deal with.

This time around we saw for definite what caused it: pecking from the other hens.

She had obviously already been pecked before we first notice the bullying, but three of the other birds jumped on her and picked at her bum, probably because it was already hanging out a bit. This time, though, they really went for it, and pecked so hard that they managed to tear off some of her dangling insides, which they quickly gobbled up.

Needless to say we’ve quarantined her. She doesn’t like being separated off from the rest of the flock, and the first thing she wants to do every time you lift the lid of the cat kennel in which we’re keeping her is jump out and run around with the rest of them, but it’s for her own good. She has light, fresh water and plenty of food (pellets and vegetable off-cuts) and although she has stopped laying, as the other one did when we separated it off, she seems fine in herself. We’re also applying Germoloids daily.

Let’s hope this is the last one.

2010 with the chickens

Nik — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 11:51:57 +0000

The last time I did an egg count update was October, taking us up to the end of September. By then we’d had 1868 eggs to date. The total now stands at 2,365. That’s a pretty staggering result, equivalent to £394 earned if we sold them at £1 per half dozen, or £670 saved on buying free range eggs at £1.70 per half dozen.

The year just gone – 2010 – saw the girls lay 1,489 eggs over the course of 12 months. That averages 124 eggs a month (about 4 a day) but as the size of our flock has grown from three to eight over that time the it’s by no means been that regular. Back in January and February when the days were short and dark we got just 29 eggs each month. In September we got seven times that number for a total of 209.

Twice we introduced new hens to the flock – first in March and then again in July.

Barbara, a Sussex Ranger who was one of our first three hens, dropped off her perch in May, never to rise again. We didn’t realise it at the time but she had been showing a classic symptom of very serious chicken illness: a dirty bum. We tried to clean her up, trimming away the matted feathers and cleaning what remained with soap and water, but she just kept on getting bigger and dopier. We still don’t know what finished her off.

And most recently, right at the end of the year, we had a prolapsed hen to deal with. Poor thing had got an egg stuck in her vent and we had to squeeze it out, then treat her bum with Germoloids. She’s making a good recovery, but we’re still treating it, which isn’t a great deal of fun.

It’s been a rewarding year with the chickens and they’ve paid us back not only with a lot of lovely eggs, but by being a pretty fascinating and slightly unusual hobby.

Muddy feet, funny smells and bum problems aside, I’m looking forward to taking them through 2011.

The prolapsed chicken is getting better

Nik — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:26:12 +0000

After four days of rather careful TLC, the prolapsed chicken is doing quite well. We even got eight eggs from the flock this morning, which suggests that she may have laid one herself, although as none of them showed any obvious smudges of Germoloids on their shells that may just be wishful thinking on our part.

We had debated finishing her off, for her own good, but we’re both glad now that we didn’t. We’ve applied Germoloids to the problem since Christmas eve and now it’s shrunk down from the size of a rather generous beef tomato to a fairly middling conker.

She hasn’t always liked it any more than we have, but she’s rarely struggled as we’ve smeared her nether-regions in the cold white cream. I think she’s glad to be out of her quarantine, too. We’d taken her out of the coop to keep her away from the other hens as it’s well-known that a flock will peck at one hen’s prolapsed vent until one of them pulls so hard on it that it pulls out all of her insides. The result is an inevitable and rather nasty death.

After three days in the cat kennel, though, she was starting to look a little dirty and apart from pecking at the Germoloids clearly wasn’t cleaning herself very well.

We put her back in with the rest of the flock yesterday and so far there’s been no trouble. Very few of them seem to have noticed anything strange going on with her bum, and whenever she’s been pecked (usually on the neck) she’s given back as good as she’s received.

It couldn’t really have happened at a worse time of year – unless, of course, it had happened when we were off on holiday and the neighbours were in charge. Even so, I think we’re both quite pleased with what we’ve managed, despite being away from home for much of the last four days and having to pay periodic visits back home to tend to her.

Let’s just hope that with a few more days of care and some more Germoloids, even that conker-sized lump may itself disappear.

One chicken, one prolapse, one tube of Germoloids… ugh.

Nik — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:41:19 +0000

What a start to Christmas. I spent a chilly hour cleaning out the chickens yesterday afternoon, and the whole time I was out there one of the Rhode Rangers was being decidedly quiet and still. I put her up on the perch, out of the way of the other hens and she sat, swaying slightly and alternately watching me or closing her eyes.

When I was done I put her back in the coop and she went and settled herself on the nest. The rest of them followed a little while later and when we went to shut up the pop hole we took a quick look inside to make sure she was alright.

She most certainly was not.

We lifted her off the nest and saw that the whole of her back end was hanging out. It was like she’d become attached to a big, very red tomato.

She’d prolapsed.

Rich held her while I pushed her insides back inside and then we quarantined her, lifting the cat kennel into the compound and shutting her up for the night in there. If you don’t then the other chickens have a tendency to eat the injured hen from the inside out. The result, inevitably, is death.

Things were no better this morning, but at least we could see the cause of her problems: there was an egg half out of her vent, and in straining to lay it she’d pushed all of her insides out again.

Chicken with a prolapsed vent

Despite this she seemed really quite content. She hopped out of the kennel and up into the trough that I’d filled with vegetable peelings last night. After a few mouthfuls of food she went to the drinker and cracked the ice on the water.

Even when we picked her up she seemed quite content, and oblivious to the fact that she was half inside out. The only time she looked like she was in mild discomfort was when I squeezed out the egg, which fell to the floor and broke.

We washed her dangling insides in warm soapy water, liberally applied some Germoloids and slipped it all back inside her again. It slid in with a little pffft.

There’s not much else we could do, really. We’ve put her back in the kennel with some food and water to keep the other hens away and to keep her clean if it should all slip out again.

I really hope that the Germoloids will do their job and help firm her up. I also hope that he doesn’t have any more eggs in the works for the time being or else she’ll probably have the same problem again in 24 hours.

Poor chicken. What a way to spend your Christmas.

The chickens have a new favourite thing

Nik — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:26:34 +0000

The chickens have a new favourite thing (and when you have the brain power of a chicken that must be a pretty radical thing).

We bought them the wrong food and didn’t spot our mistake until we’d opened up the sack when we discovered 20kg not of tidy Layers Pellets but 20kg of dusty Layers Mash. We’ve never use this before for one simple reason: simplicity. Or lack of it.

With pellets all you need to do is pour it into the hopper and walk away. With mash, which is the same thing in powder form, you need to mix it with water, which I’d never fancied before.

How wrong I was.

The chickens love it on these cold mornings, when their water is freezing overnight and the temperature in the coop is dropping to -3C overnight. We’re mixing it up with warm water to stop it from freezing and they’re diving in, almost literally, stuffing their beaks so far into the pasty mess that it’s getting up their noses and making them sneeze. It’s quite cute.

I shouldn’t be surprised. It looks a bit like Ready Brek, and we all know how good that is on a winter’s morning.