Monday, March 12, 2012
Egg Bound Chicken
This past Tuesday, I was outside watching the chickens and collecting eggs when I noticed one of our polish hens was laying kinda of awkward and wouldn't move when proded, so I picked her up and discovered that she had an egg sticking out a little but it was huge!! Plus she had poop and "goo" all matted into her bum feathers. Not good, I set her back down and quickly ran into the house to get my copy of "Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens", re-read the section about egg bound chickens, grabbed an old towel and ran back to the coop, gently wrapped her in the towel and carried her back to the house, where I filled up the laundry sink with warm soapy water set her in it (the water came up just to the top of her back) I swished the water around for a bit. The book said to leave her in there about 15 minutes but about the 10 minute mark the egg came out but it was all broken, there was no blood so I was pretty confident that I helped her out and all was good I washed up her feathers and put her in a box with the towel and left her in the laundry room for a while to rest and dry. I put her back in the coop and she seemed to be ok she just didn't want to move, I put that down to just being sore and a little stressed from the ordeal, after all I was a little stressed myself. But, on Saturday when we were working on the barn I noticed that she was limping, what is going I thought. I picked her up and she had what I thought looked like a little cut, but she also had poop and goo in her feathers again. So Hubs and I put her in a transport cage with some straw, food and water and moved her into the house to heal up. I don't know if she was injured before the egg deal, or if I hurt her in my haste to help her, or if that huge of an egg did some damage. We are still watching her, but I don't know what will happen.
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