Our Injured Chicken

This afternoon didn't exactly go as I had envisioned. When I got home from a long day (and a longer, boring meeting), Tiegan let me know that the chickens needed water. But when I went out to get the fount, I saw Abigail lying in one of the laying boxes. She was oddly splayed on her side, with one wing stretched out back toward the hen house. Her eyes were closed.

So I thought she was sick. Or dead.

I ran around to the outside to open the nesting box door. I gently scooped her up. And then I saw the blood.

So then I thought the other chickens had turned on her and pecked at her — especially with her one eye closed.

After a closer look over Abigail, I realized the blood was coming from her foot, which had been pinched in the door of the nesting box. She had probably been stuck in there for 20-30 minutes, from when Tiegan shut the nesting box door until I got home and out to check the water. I carried Abigail into the house, where I had to work on stopping the bleeding:


She was remarkably docile throughout this ordeal. Tiegan helped with supplying clean replacement paper towels and giving Abigail sips of water periodically, while I just kept as much pressure as I could on the two toes that were bleeding. 

Tiegan also did some google searching about broken feet and cuts on chickens, and what we read made us feel better — especially the post about someone who accidentally amputated two chicken toes by closing a door on it. That made Jonas cry, but in general the online consensus was that chickens are tough.

By the time we got the bleeding to mostly stop (using pressure and some internet-recommended flour to help with clotting), Kirk was home and ready to apply his nursing skills to Abigail's foot:


There are two nasty cuts, with some swelling and a loss of a scale or two. I thought at first that the toe on the far left in the photo was broken, but it seems to be ok — just cut deeply near the claw. 

Kirk wisely got a towel for my lap, and I held our chicken while he used some peroxide and gauze to clean up the wound, then put some bacitracin on to try to keep it from getting infected. He also wrapped the injured toes in gauze as well as he could while still leaving her room to move it.

I really wish I had a picture of her white-bandaged, mummified foot, because it was some A-plus home veterinary work. But by that point we wanted to get her settled for the night as soon as we could, so Kirk took her out into the hen house and set her directly on the roosting bar, which she seemed able to grip after initially wobbling a bit. 

We were careful to clean the blood off her feathers, and hopefully there's not too much more additional blood on the bandage by morning. The concern with the blood is that it will encourage the other chickens to peck at Abigail if they see she's bleeding (because that's what chickens do). We don't really have any kind of quarantine set up, but Kirk will check on her tomorrow morning, and I guess if it seems like there's an issue (or if her bandage is terribly, obviously red) he can put her in the day spa just to be safe. I doubt he'll be able to re-bandage her foot without another adult around to hold her, and I leave before sun-up, so that will have to be an evening project.

And now I am exhausted.

But one final note: While I was sitting cradling an injured hen, Kirk was fielding a call about a billing issue from the dairy that delivers our milk (glass bottle and all) on Wednesdays.

I got farmers' problems, y'all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more