Portia's Tale

So Portia, our oldest hen and Hen-In-Chief Ellen's best friend, has been ill for a couple of weeks now. She's been losing weight, and yesterday I noticed her comb was pale instead of the nice, healthy red it should be. I was not sure whether to ascribe her condition to just old age or something else, and so I decided to attempt a treatment program.

So today I went to the farm supply store to get some tetracycline, in case there was a possibility she had some kind of bacterial infection.  I'm not generally a go-to antibiotic kind of gal, but since Portia no longer lays and is looking so sick, I figured it couldn't hurt anything.

When I got home I was getting ready to quarantine her with her antibiotic water when she squatted in front of me and took a good sized poop.  As any animal owner can tell you, this is a boon when it happens because it allows you to examine their feces and see if it can provide any clues to illness.  While I do check the flock's droppings regularly, I am never sure whose is whose, so this was worth of getting out the magnifying glass and doing a close exam on. (Mark this #789 in the file of things this former city girl would never thought she'd be doing -- pulling apart chicken feces with a stick and feeling appreciative of the chicken who provided it).

What I saw shocked me.  Portia has roundworms -- quite a lot of them -- which I have never seen in any of the other chickens.  But when one member of the flock carries a parasite, it's a good bet the rest of them do as well, and so this afternoon I started treating the whole flock with Wazine.  This means I will have to discard all their eggs for a couple of weeks, which won't be fun.  And then in 21 days I get to treat them again and go through the same process.

I have to take responsibility for this, as a failure of awareness on my part.  It's recommended you worm your flock every six months or so, but since everyone looked and seemed healthy I have put it off for about 18 months.  Yet I should have begun thinking of the possibility of worms as soon as Portia began to look sickly. That was an oversight on my part, and I regret it. I am somewhat comforted by the fact that, at the time of this writing, she is still alive and has a fighting chance of recovering once her parasite issue is resolved, which it should be, in about 24 hours.

But I say today to my fellow chicken owners, worm at least once a year.  While you can probably never keep free-range birds completely parasite-free, it's important to keep their loads low enough that it does not affect their health. And if you have even a single bird that looks sickly, consider worms before anything else, even if the rest of the flock is asymptomatic.

Oh, and if you keep dogs alongside your chickens, you will need to worm them as well, since roundworms are found in both dogs and chickens and cross-species infection is possible.

Well, this hurts

Throwing food out has always been something that I hate to do.  The fact is, Americans throw out approximately 40 percent of the food they buy, most of the time because they end up in the form of leftovers and we don't know what to do with them.  Our grandmothers would have made soup or casseroles out of it all, but we don't live in a culture that re-purposes leftovers, so they end up getting thrown away.

I try and re-invent leftovers as much as possible, but face a stiff audience -- my family -- who doesn't care for leftovers unless they're something fabulous that can be re-heated in much the same form it started in.  Like burrito meat.  But leftover celery, a small piece of cornbread, or some cranberry sauce will usually sit in the fridge until I finally get disgusted and throw it out.  I probably make more effort than the average person to re-use leftovers, but I have a long way to go, I will be honest.

But we are worming our chickens right now, they did their time on the Wazine and now we are waiting for it to clear their system.  In the meantime, their eggs are inedible, and so, as perfect and lovely as they appear, they have to go straight into the trash.  We can't even give them to the dogs, because they are being wormed right now as well and they don't need any double-dosing on the active ingredients in the wormers.

One week from today we can again begin collecting and consuming our eggs, but until then....it's going to look like this.  And more than store-bought goods, when I see my hens producing food, I'm much less likely to want to waste it.  And so it hurts, more than a little, to throw these away.

Chicken Butt

When the boys were little, they used to play a little joke on other kids, where they'd ask,"Guess what?" and the answer would be, "chicken butt!"  Apparently if you are a 12 year-old boy, this is absolutely hilarious.  But I'll tell you, chicken butts are serious business.

Guess what?  Chicken butt!

Last week for instance, I noticed a marked increase of what I would discreetly call, "dirty eggs" coming out of one of the nest boxes  Occasionally, under normal circumstances, chicken eggs can have a little trace of dung on them, here and there, and when that happens you simply leave it there until right before you are ready to crack the egg, since there is a protective bloom on the eggshell that keeps the insides free of germs.  In fact, if you do what seems the common-sense thing to to, which is wash the egg immediately after bringing it in the house,  you destroy the bloom on the shell and thereby potentially contaminate your egg.

Ellen: Not amused by chicken butt humor

But where I am going with this is that I started getting eggs that were beyond help, they were so messy. The last one was so awful I just fed it to the dog, right there and then.  But when I went in search of the culprit I found Ellen, a Buff Orpington, with a ton of built-up, caked-on dung all over her rear feathers.

I ended up having to bring her inside and put her into a warm bath, just to loosen it up.  Then, since I was afraid the others would pull at her feathers if they looked soaking wet, I gave her a little blow dry afterwards.  And a sample-sized packet of styling mousse to take home and try.  Just kidding on that last one.

All those years I fantasized about owning chickens, bathing their asses and giving them a blow dry was not something I'd ever imagined doing, but there you go. Farm life is like that.

So that happened.  Now I have clean eggs again, but upon further research, I understand a dirty chicken bottom could be a sign of roundworm infestation, so last night I went to Tractor Supply Store and bought some Wazine wormer not only for my chickens, but also some Safeguard for my two dogs.  Because I know the chickens have surely sampled some of the delish dog turds out in our yard, and I know the dogs occasionally dine on chicken poop.

The bad news is that once I get started on this, we will not be able to eat the chicken eggs for about 14 days, as the chemicals used to worm them will be released into whatever eggs they lay.  But hopefully I have enough eggs stored up that we'll be fine, and when we're all done, the hens will be too.

And clean chicken butts for all will be the order of the day.  As it should be.