Recuperation

You're welcome for avoiding a terrible chicken pun in the title.

This morning Kirk checked on Abigail and found her bandage almost all the way off, so he removed it and put her into the portable run. Since her foot is still a red, exposed, slightly bloody mess, it's really important for us to keep her away from the other chickens (you know, so they don't get a taste for blood and peck her to death — chickens are dicks). Kirk snapped this photo of our flamingo impersonator before he left for work:


As you can see, she's trying not to put weight on that injured foot. Still, it looks like she had a nice day, since she picked the last of the rye grass clean, and had no trouble with drinking water since it was around 40 degrees today.

When I got home from work to check on her, she was walking gingerly around the run, eating grain and drinking water. It was clear that she had laid an egg — and pooped, too — so we're able to check off several major signs of chicken health.

When Kirk got home, we brought her into the kitchen to wash her foot, which over the course of the day had been crusted over with dirt. We put on some new bacitracin and a new bandage, which I got a picture of this time:


I was able to speak with a vet on the phone today, and she recommended keeping her quarantined indoors, so that we could control the environment better to keep her foot clean until it heals up. To this end, we moved our portable chicken run into the workshop, where she can walk around on a dirt-free floor. This will be kind of a pain to muck out on a (mostly) daily basis, but it will hopefully keep her wounds from getting infected. The vet also suggested Silvadene as the best ointment we could use on her foot, but we will need a prescription for that. 

The only one who doesn't think this is a good plan is Fletch, who is likely to be quite put out with a giant chicken run in his warm workshop sleeping space. I imagine he'll get over it, though, with the blizzard that is heading our way — having a roommate has got to be better than slogging through two feet of snow!

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