Everyone needs help sometimes. Even a strong leader can fall
ill to some ailment large or small and be brought low for a time. A little
help, a little recuperation, and a renewed attitude on life can do wonders.
One day, I walked out to the run to see the flock and tend
to their needs. By and large, chickens are a lot hardier than they look and if
properly fed and housed, they pretty much take care of themselves. Never the
less, issues do arise from time to time and keeping a careful eye helps prevent
minor issues from becoming major catastrophes.
Chickens have their own social structure and their own laws
for dealing with issues. To the casual outside observer, trouble is usually
responded to by hens fleeing for cover in all directions. While this is at
least partially true, their social structure also gives the flock order and
each hen plays a part. But if a hen is sick or injured, they will keep a distance
from the others. Chickens, on their own, have no doctors. A sick or injured hen
can put the whole flock at risk so they can have a natural tendency to pick on
an injured hen, or chase away an ill hen. A sick or injured hen will also seek
her own company away from the flock for these same reasons.
For reasons that weren’t immediately apparent, the alpha
female, Hermione (also the smallest hen, oddly enough) was standing fairly
still away from the rest of the flock. She is also Coq Au’s favorite girl so it
was quite odd that neither he nor the rest of the girls were paying her any
mind at all. Nor was she seeking their company. She is usually in the thick of
things laying down the law to the other girls and strutting pridefully around,
but today she seemed somewhat sullen. She was standing kind of funny too.
I opened the run to let the girls out into the yard and she
was reluctant to come out, but she did. I threw down some treats and the girls clamored
over each other to get them, but she didn’t come near. I threw some in her
direction and noted that she took a passing interest and did eat some. If she’s
not off her food, then it can’t be too bad, but I watched.
Hens have a very distinctive shape to their bodies.
Especially good layers, and Hermione was one of the best. She lays large eggs
for a girl of her slight frame, but her shape was all off. The way she stood,
the way she walked, it was almost penguin-like. By now, I had read and reread
enough of the common chicken ailments to know that she was probably ‘egg bound’.
'Egg bound' is where an egg is stuck in the hen’s laying tract
and can be anywhere from uncomfortable to downright painful for her. And … as
per usual … if not handled properly … can be fatal. An egg bound hen can’t walk
right, stand right, sleep right, or eat right and her laying tract can continue
to become backed up. I spent the next half an hour trying to catch her without
injuring her or attracting too much attention from an angry rooster and thus
becoming injured myself! She was not at her best and disinclined to bunch up
with the rest of the girls so a little gentle patience won the day and I caught
her. She was terrified when I out the blanket over her, but that calmed her
quite a bit. I brought her into the house, washed my hands, gently held her on
her back in the bath tub and gently, very gently, probed her cloaca. Sure
enough, there was an egg in there and for whatever the reason, she was having
trouble laying it.
I released her back outside and went off to consult the
mystic chicken gurus of the interwebs whose dread knowledge is the answer to
all questions great and small and reviewed the possible outcomes. The best
outcome was that she would pass the egg herself in a few hours to a day, but
there were great cautions against just letting it go. The worst case was that
she would continue to be bound up and die. There was NO WAY I was going to
allow that to happen to our little devil-may-care punk rock girl! The middle
ground would be to puncture the egg and thus let it break. While this would
reduce the size and allow it to pass, extracting the shells would need to be
done with practically surgical precision or they may injure the soft internal
tissue of the hen and thus put her at great risk. This being my first go around
with an egg bound hen, I was NOT going to go that route!
I decided that she would have to pass the egg herself, but
that there were things to do to help her and I was willing to do them! I ran
out to the store for some Rolaids and KY lubricant. I also called my wife and
let her know what was going on so that she didn’t question why there was a
chicken in the house. Oh crap … I let her go outside and would have to catch
her again.
After a second half an hour with a more wary hen, I had
her under the towel again. She was scared again, but calm. I brought her back
into the bathroom and filled the sink with warm water. The experts explained
that one of the causes could be stress and soothing the bird in a warm bath
would help her tension relax. Who knew that chickens got stressed? Who knew
they like warm baths? Well, no one explained this to Hermione because she had
no interest in sitting down in the warm water. She stubbornly stood in the sink
without letting her bottom come NEAR the water.
While this battle of wills played out in slow motion, I took
a couple of Rolaids and broke them into small pieces. You see, one of the
causes for being egg bound could be lack of calcium, and anyway, the extra
calcium carbonate would stimulate the egg laying process. What the geniuses of
the web failed to mention was how to get a stubborn hen to TAKE the pieces of Rolaids.
So there I was. A confused hen standing in a sink full of warm water staring
blankly at me while I offered her some antacids. You can’t make this stuff up.
Added stress be damned, a grasped her and got a few pieces
into her beak. She was going to get better whether she wanted to or not and the
union rep was not around for her to lodge a formal complaint! Next came the ‘fun’
part.
As per the best advice of the knowledgeable experts, I held
poor little Hermione on her back again in the bathtub while I gently (and I do
mean gently) probed her cloaca with a finger full of KY. Man, the egg was so
near the surface and it was indeed large. Her vent did look red and swollen
from the effort of trying to lay this monster that I felt like the KY would, in
fact, do some good, but if anyone had told me a year ago that I’d be in my
bathroom with a finger lodged a knuckle or two deep into the underside of a
live hen, I’d have said that would have been a very unlikely scenario. But …
here we were, Hermione and I, at the moment of a trust bond in our familial
relationship.
After I felt like that spread as much personal lubricant around
the affected area as I could and had gotten as many pieces of Rolaids into her
as she was willing to take, I set her down on a soft pillow in a blanket with a
warm towel over her so she could relax and de-stress. An hour later I repeated
my failed attempt to give her a soothing soak and out her back to rest. An
hour after that, herself came home.
“Where’s the poor baby!”
I gently shushed her and took her into the bathroom for a
peek. After she was sure our little leader of the flock was resting
comfortably, I explained what I had done so far and that soaking for fifteen minutes
each hour was recommended, but that I was having trouble with that. With soak
time approaching, my wife helped me. She held Hermione by the body, while I
folded her legs in a bit and we got her to make contact with the water. We had
to hold her in place with a hand on her back, as she remained perpetually
unconvinced that a soak was a good thing. We were going to repeat the process
through the evening until she laid her egg, hopefully by morning, but her time
away from the flock was cut short.
At some point, as evening approached, even though the lights
in the bathroom were off to keep her calm and allow her to rest, she decided it
was her new mission in life to kill the strange hen she encountered in the
mirror. That hen didn’t look like anyone she knew and it didn’t smell like …
well … it didn’t smell like anyone at all! So, she or her, one of them had to
go!
With this new ruckus, we knew her time at the spa had come
to an end. We were a little fearful of returning her to the flock, she was
still egg bound, and now having been away from the flock for hours, the others
might treat her with suspicion and pick on her. Fortunately, it was getting
dark and the hens were looking to go to bed, so once they were in the coop, we
placed her gently in one of the nesting boxes and hoped for the best.
I’ll never know if it was the calcium carbonate, the KY, the
soak, or just time, but next day she passed the egg. With crisis narrowly
averted, the flock returned to normal and Hermione resumed her place as the top
girl, although Coq Au let her rest for a few days before resuming his
particular brand of attention to her. At least he had that much class.
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