You Take the Good, You Take the Bad...

The good news is that the chicks and their mama seem to be fully integrated into the flock. The bad news is that we unexpectedly lost a hen.

After four days together in the coop, it seems Kendra and her chicks, Harmony, Joyce and White Witch Willow, are getting along fairly well with the rest of the flock. Occasionally I will catch Anya desperately trying to hold on to her place in the pecking order but she seems to be relenting to the fact that her status as Number 4 is now back to Number 5. The chicks have also taken a real liking to Dawn, our head “rooster” and Number 2 in the pecking order (Buffy is Number 1, of course, and nobody messes with Buffy) and like to hang out with her, much to her dismay. She seems annoyed when the chicks want to hang out next to her, kind of like I am with kids, but goes along with it until she finds a way to focus their attention elsewhere or just walk away when they aren’t looking, which is also a lot like me. Hmmm… I think my chicken and I have a lot in common. Is that weird?

Anyway, so yesterday as I was checking the temperature I watched the little ones fly out of the henhouse for a drink of water, and all the hens were busy having a dust bath or walking back and forth between the food and water. About ten minutes later I decided to go collect the eggs for the day. Now normally when I open the back door all the hens will line up at the front of the coop to see if I am going to let them out and I saw all but one… a cause for concern normally, but only ten minutes before I had seen them all so I wasn’t too worried even though Cordelia wasn’t there. As I walked up to the coop I saw why. Now this isn’t the first dead chicken I’ve come across, but it is the first time I’d seen one appear fine and then just die a few minutes later. I took her out of the coop and examined her for signs of trauma but she had no wounds of any sort on her. The only thing I noticed on my second examination of her after collecting the eggs was that she appeared to have a prolapsed vent, but I didn’t see that a minute earlier so I don’t know if that was the cause or if it happened postmortem. Either way, our green egg layer is gone.

And so it is that the three new additions to our flock seem to be doing well, while one member hasn’t fared well at all. I’m not sure what killed her because she’d been eating and drinking normally and even layed an egg that morning. It may have been the heat or maybe she was just good at hiding her illness if she had one. The only thing abnormal about her was that her eggs appeared to have extra bumps on the shells rather than being smooth like the rest of our layers. I just wonder if I had gone out there fifteen minutes before if things would be any different. But…

… you take them both, and there you have, the facts of life.