Recirculating Cheese

So, having done the Radio Free Chicken thing once, and signed up to do it a couple more times at Nevins, I've been requested to go on tour to Cow Hampshire, on behalf of the Animal Control Officer who came to the first one.

a) If you're not a chicken person, what would you like to know about raising chickens, where you are right now?

b) If you're already a chicken person, what would you like to have known before starting? Or, what do would you still like to know?

Guess what we did this morning.


(Sadly, our own bushes have been a total bust this year. These are from Turkey Hill Farm in Haverhill.)

( and a few more pictures of cute chicks )

This chicken died suddenly last night (pic from a post about 3 years ago):



She had been unusually subdued, lethargic even. Francie was worried that she might be egg-bound, so brought her inside for a warm hip-bath and abdominal massage, and produced a strange object from her vent (more about that below). We set up a cage in the office, and she seemed to be resting peacefully, until she suddenly pitched over on her face, thrashed violently a couple of times, and died. Just like that.

So here's the object extracted from the chicken's butt: ( cut for the squeamish, though it's more odd than squicky )

It's a hard mass of tissue, about an inch long, with a large piece of tough, dry, folded membrane protruding from one end. There's no blood, and no connective tissue - this thing came out entire.

I suppose it's vaguely possible that it was a developing egg, but it's unlike any egg I've ever seen. Also, she was laying as recently as the day before she died, so I'm not convinced that it was egg binding.

The consistency of the object is more like a tumor, but do tumors ever just detach and flush themselves out of the system?

Maybe a bezoar? I'm completely at a loss to explain this thing.

Here it is with the membrane unfolded a bit: ( again, cut )

The other day, we missed collecting this egg, and it froze. Francie carefully peeled it.



Here it's mostly thawed, and you can clearly see the membrane.

We adopted a pair of Ameracauna hens in September. They looked full grown, but they weren't laying, and weren't laying, and when were they going to start laying?

Yesterday they started laying. Yes, they are bluish. You can see they're a bit smaller than the standard large egg (from the local poultry farm), but they may get bigger as the hens mature.

Today the bantam resumed laying too, but she had apparently forgotten what to do, because we found the egg under the perch (oops).

This one was my fault. I thought Kylie had closed the hen house last night, but I didn't check. In the morning, lots of white feathers, leading off into the woods, and that's all we have left of Thistle, the white silkie (the other hen that was sitting quail eggs this time last year). I'm thinking fox rather than weasel this time, since it jumped the fence. I am fail.

We buried another hen this morning. Unlike the last one, we knew how old this one was - 2½, so age definitely wasn't a factor here.

She'd been looking a little peaky last week, and she'd lost a bit of weight in the last month (since I weighed her to determine worming dosage). I put the whole flock on tetracycline, and she seemed a bit perkier through the weekend. However, I didn't weigh her, so I didn't have really objective data.

This morning, she was listless and droopy - couldn't hold herself up. I held her, and forced her to drink, but she barely opened her eyes, and she was gone within the hour.

So, what next? I'm going to weigh the 4 remaining birds at least weekly, and continue the tetracycline for the remainder of the week. The first sign of sickness wins a trip to the vet (assuming Andover Animal Hospital has anyone at the moment who knows poultry - there's a lot of turnover in that practice).

I was at the Agway on Friday, and they had day-old chicks. So cute, but I'm not bringing home any new birds until we get this figured out.

I came in for my Friday morning shift at Nevins farm to find about 500 chickens and 200 ducks from a recent seizure. There are 100 chickens in the regular quarantine area in the hay loft, plus four horse stalls full of chickens. The ducks are in two large stalls with turnout. They haven't been fully counted yet, and the staff are just starting on the blood tests.

(To show what I'm like in the morning, I was cleaning a horse stall for about 10 minutes before I noticed the stall next to me was filled with chickens. They were quiet, and I was oblivious.)

Recall that we got 10 mail-order bobwhite quail eggs, and divided them between the two broody bantam hens.

Millie is a mille-fleur d'Uccle, who likes to sit in one of the two nest boxes in the coop. Unfortunately, this is the same nest box that Penelope, the big Rhode Island Red, insists on laying her eggs in. We tried to move Millie to the other nest box, but she abandoned the eggs for her familiar nest. What with one thing and another, five eggs became four, then three, then (mysteriously) two. OTOH, there haven't been any of the big RI eggs for a few days, and Penelope's usually a very consistent layer, so Millie may have been eating the big intruder eggs.

Thistle is a white silkie, who had already taken to nesting outside the coop, in the enclosed run. Her five eggs have only shrunk to four, and she's been positively devoted to them, sitting 24x7.

We candled all the eggs tonight. (Shine as bright a light as you can get through the shell, and look for signs of organization and life. Veins and opaque masses are good, especially if they're moving.) One of Thistle's four is either infertile, or otherwise failed to develop. OTOH, her three remaining eggs are more developed than Millie's, probably due to more devoted brooding.

So we should get five chicks, with Thistle's three possibly this weekend, and Millie's two several days behind.

a. This was the weekend of Trivial Repairs That Took Way Too Long.

a1: The degus destroyed the plastic pan of their cage a few weeks ago, so Francie bought a cheap (where "cheap" is a relative term) rat cage with a metal tray of approximately the right size, and threw out the cage part. But a) that was a kludge, and b> they would soon need more space, so she procured a ferret cage. Well, the bars are about ¾" apart, and the young degus quickly showed that they can slip through that, although mature degus might not (be able or be inclined). (And, truth to tell, I've heard that ferrets can get through such openings as well.) So an emergency trip to the hardware store, 5 minutes before closing time, got us a length of ½" galvanized mesh, which we then had to cut, trim (it still put several holes in Francie's shirt), and attach to the cage. And it ain't never coming off.

a2:The chicken run that we replaced last summer because it collapsed the previous winter, also collapsed this last winter, also under the weight of snow on the non-snow-shedding aviary netting. So we built a third castle, and that one burned, fell over, and sank into the swamp... No, actually I just got some 2x4s and joist hangers, and reinforced the roof every 8'. And if that doesn't hold, then we'll either look for wide-mesh narrow-gauge chicken wire, or just leave the top uncovered, and take our chances. We do have hawks and owls in the woods, but the developers are taking away the woods.

2) In riding news, I've theoretically switched from a 1-day-a-week partial lease to a full half-lease (3 days a week), but I haven't decided which days I'm riding, and I didn't actually get riding at all during the week. But I did ride out Sunday with Laine, the barn owner, who's recovering from having been trampled a couple weeks ago, and recovering very nicely, apparently - we hand-galloped fully a mile from the last turning to the parking lot, and trotted all the way back. Afterwards, back in the ring at the barn, one of the new leasers had set up a row of cones for a pole-bending type of exercise. I took Cheyenne through them once under saddle, and once bareback, and I tell you, he's a natural (or he's had rodeo training) - he picked the absolutely more economical (fastest) line through them.

It's probably been more than a decade since I tried pole-bending, but it turns out what you need to do is not concentrate on the next pole, but the one after that. i.e. You can't think "I need to get around that pole", but rather "I need to get to that pole yonder, going around this pole up here", and you automatically get the best line. I don't ski, let alone ski-race, but I imagine the slalom racers do something similar.

iii: Aikido tonight for the first time in a couple weeks. It's been too beastly hot, and the Orc has been unable to practice, which has been part of our Wednesday night date for 8 years. It's less beastly tonight, but the gym is still not air-conditioned, and our sensei turns the fan off at the beginning of class, so he can be heard (guffaw). At the end of class, I was looking for a dry corner of my gi, to wipe my face with. The sweaty gi is one of those things that's not too bad when you're in it (and everyone else is in their own sweaty gi), but is revolting the instant you take it off. Since it's not going in the laundry immediately, it's hanging up to dry, in the bathroom with the cat box.