ingrid

The weather is better and MOST of our chickens are looking much healthier and happier… all except the dead one that is.  We lost a chicken last night.  Dear sweet Bella (white one in the middle) had been acting sort of strange during the day.  I noticed her standing in a weird spot in the run.  I have a hard time quantifying what was so weird about this “weird spot” because there isn’t anything truly odd about where she was standing, but it is just not a place that my chickens regularly choose to hang out.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, she was standing there sort of nodding off and I thought, “That’s odd…” but left her there as it was sort of nap time and I was tired myself.  (Did you know that chickens nap during the day?  They are tired just at the same time I am tired!  Another reason why I like them!) When I returned to put the chickens in before leaving for a dinner party, she was sprawled out on the ground, twisting her head around and frankly not looking good.  It was apparent to me that she was certainly going to die and there wasn’t much that I might do about it.  I took her inside the house and inspected her body, gave her some water, and put her in a box full of clean hay.  There was nothing wrong with her body besides the seeming paralysis, greeny poop and messy vent.  I thought for about a minute about running a finger up in there to check for an egg that she couldn’t pass, but I mistakenly thought that I had gathered an egg from her that very day, so I didn’t bother.  Today when I got another tiny white and pointy egg in the nestbox it became clear— I had been matching this egg with the wrong chicken.  Even with this information, it seems unlikely that she had egg-bind.  The twisting head part makes the illness seem more nervous system related…. which is sort of a problem.

Bella was dead in the box by the morning of course.  Meanwhile, I was worried about possible disease that might bring the whole flock down.  I have this chicken manual that is THE REFERENCE for poultry keepers everywhere.  Unfortunately, it is written more for a serious operation than for a layperson like myself.  Most of the diagnosis for disease is only evident with an autopsy, and although I did spend about 5 minutes thinking, “Now I would bet I could cut this girl open and check if white deposits are on her liver!”, I think that maybe this sort of real science is not me.  I don’t even have a scalpel in the house anyway.  And the last time I cut anything open was high school science class.

So instead of picking up the hacksaw, I decided to scrub out the henhouse with bleach and water, pressure wash the roosts and make sure any infected poop was out of there.  This done, I settled in to check out the rest of the flock and saw…..nothing.  Everyone seems fine, healthy even.  Rosey fat foot is looking better, nearly normal actually.  Everyone looks plump and shiny with nice red combs and wattles.  And they are laying like a  henhouse on fire.  We are getting about 6 eggs a day.

The kids are sort of strangely unaffected.  They vacillate between being sad and asking if they can get another chicken… or maybe three!  Francis did have a 2 minute meltdown where she cried quite enthusiastically.  I don’t know how to respond to this sometimes as in these moments I feel the kids watching me, ready to follow my lead.  I don’t want to make a misstep in times like this.  Although I too am sad, I know that animals dying is just sort of part of life.  It is what happens when we choose this husbandry.  It is confusing in a different way from when people are sick.  You can’t ask the chicken what it needs, how it feels, if it wants a drink of water.  When I saw how Bella was acting, I knew that she would die.  There was nothing that I could do except make her comfortable and check back to see when the dying happened.  They live, they die.  We live, we die.  We are kind of powerless, aren’t we?

In: Chickens Are Super Fabulous, Current musings | | #