I’d [...]]]>
First let me apologize to any of you that have sent me an email about chicken doctoring and I haven’t answered it…or even worse, it took me a month to respond.  Yikes!  I hope all those chickens are doing okay out there.  I really am sorry about not getting to your questions.

I’d also like to take this moment to personally apologize to my own flock of chickens.  I’ve discovered that I’m a fair weather farmer and I don’t love the chickens nearly as much when the temperature dips below 56 degrees.  Which is precisely the reason my husband continues to refuse the purchase of a milk cow for me.  He knows I’ll love that cow until the first freeze and then I’ll let it out to pasture, smack it on the butt and say, “See you when the daffodils bloom! Good luck!  I’ll be wrapped in a blanket drinking hot coffee inside my house…if you need anything, uhhh, well, GOOD LUCK!”

I make my children feed and water the chickens in the winter.  I know, I’m a genius.

Okay, since I’m shirking my duties as the resident Chicken Doctor, I thought I’d let you take over for me.  Here’s a question that I never answered from Marla.  Can any of you help a chicken?  Let’s hear some advice for this poor clucker.

Have you ever had a chicken that was egg-bound?  We have a little hen (just hatched last August, started laying in January) that’s been acting weird now for 2 days.  She sits down on the floor a lot and doesn’t seem to want to walk around.  I looked on-line for being egg-bound, but her symptoms don’t seem to match it 100%.  She does this strange thing with her chest…kind of makes me think of when a dog is about to barf…how they kind of heave.  I know that sounds weird.  She doesn’t have her mouth open, she just keeps making this repetitive motion & it started yesterday.  We’ve felt her stomach like the on-line sources say to do, to see if we can feel an egg, but my husband feels nothing.  Her rear-end is “flexing”, though, which really makes me wonder.

Now, this afternoon, my husband says her comb is bleeding, so obviously the other ones are picking on her.  Any ideas???

Marla

My turkey drowned in the neighbor’s watering tank.  I know I will look back on this and laugh, eventually, but right now I’m just so sad.

I’ve been dealing with teenagers all [...]]]> I don’t cry very easily, but  this morning I had to go to my room and bawl for just a few minutes.

My turkey drowned in the neighbor’s watering tank.  I know I will look back on this and laugh, eventually, but right now I’m just so sad.

I’ve been dealing with teenagers all week that stare at me like a deer caught in the headlights when I ask them to hand in their fundraising packets.  One of them expressed how “GAY” he thought the party is that I’ve worked on for, oh, let’s see, six months.  I’m happy to report that after a few words that same boy was apologizing to me and giving me a hug…lucky he’s still alive.

And really, everything in my job has been a lot of fun and I’m excited to see so much generosity playing out for this school, but I’m in the final stretch and the stress might be bubbling to the surface just a tiny bit which I knew would happen and I’m not at all surprised that my emotions are overly charged.

Yesterday, I dropped my kids off at home with instructions to carry all laundry down, sort it and get it started.  You know where this is going, don’t you?  I headed back to town to run more errands for my job.  I called to check on the kids’ progress, “Yeah, yeah we’re doing it Mom…blah, blah, blah.”

No laundry was done.  But, my two little boys did manage to put all the clean laundry laying on their dresser into their dirty clothes hamper, so nice of them.

I didn’t know the task hadn’t been done until I walked upstairs to go to bed and saw all the hampers full to the brim.  If words could explain my anger this blog would be toxic.

I got up at 5:30 this morning, and we all know that I am NOT a morning person, right?  Guess what I was doing?  Yep, carting and sorting the laundry and smelling every article of clothing in my little boys’ hamper to determine if it was clean or dirty and you don’t want to know how many pairs of dirty underwear I stuck my nose in before I decided to just wash all of it.

So, I’m already mad as Hell at my kids and I’m working out in head various methods of torture that I will perform on them when Virginia, my sweet neighbor, calls Clay over to come look in her watering tank.

I was flipping French Toast when Clay came through the door to tell me about our turkey and that was the end of me.  I couldn’t hold back the tears.

We’ve had a lot of animals perish since we’ve started this little farming habit of ours.  It’s never fun to find a dead animal.  It used to shock me, but after burying cats and chickens and another turkey I’ve grown a bit used to animals meeting their demise on the farm.

This turkey was going to be our Thanksgiving bird, maybe.  I loved listening to her chirping and she was so gentle and docile that both Clay and I weren’t sure if we had the heart to butcher her.

Yesterday, I was in a hurry to get to school so I fed the animals and let all my chickens out to graze.  We have one natural source they can go to for water and a water trough in their pen. I figured I’d let them go to the water source and I didn’t fill their trough.  So, in a huge way, I feel responsible for her jumping into the water tank.  If I’d filled the trough would she have done that?  Probably.  Turkeys aren’t very smart and they are terribly clumsy.  We’ve saved them from getting caught in silly situations several times and they were so lucky we found them.  Oh, the guilt of a farmer when a good animal’s death could have been prevented.  I feel horrible.  Even more horrible than I probably would if I didn’t have the stress of poop-stain children weighing on me.

So, there you have it.  My kids are turkeys, the teens at school are turkeys and my turkey is dead RIP sweet Gobble Girl.

I think it’s time to start posting some of the great questions I get from readers, because they think I might know a thing or two about chickens.  I want to give all the other Chicken Doctors out there a chance to chime in their opinions.

Let’s start off with this delightful letter [...]]]>

I think it’s time to start posting some of the great questions I get from readers, because they think I might know a thing or two about chickens.  I want to give all the other Chicken Doctors out there a chance to chime in their opinions.

Let’s start off with this delightful letter from Shorty in MN.

Dear Chicken Doctor,

I have six laying hens…..and they are cannibals!  Yes, cannibals.  They eat their young.  At first I thought it was only one or two of the hens, but I’ve discovered that they all partake in the egg eating parties.  I’ve put golf balls with hot sauce in the nesting boxes — that worked for a day.  I have ceramic eggs in there too.  Doesn’t help.  I do have one hen that is “settin’” on a golf ball.  Poor thing.  Maybe she figures if she can’t eat it, she may as well hatch it??

So, any advice?  How do I stop this cannibalism?  Is it even possible?  Do I need to roast these birds and start over?  (I can hardly bear the thought of buying eggs again).

Sincerely,

Short on Eggs in MN

Okay, smart readers, what would you do for your egg eating chickens?