Crazy Chicken Lady10
In the Brooder
- Jan 29, 2020
- 40
- 55
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A few months ago, one of my hens, Henrietta, starting acting off. She started sitting in the nesting box all day but stopped laying eggs. Whenever I or another chicken gets near her when she is like this, she puffs up her feathers. I have to lift her out of the nesting box and set her outside. She will sit on the ground all puffed up for a minute before running to meet her flock. But she always comes back to the nesting box after a while. Even when she would be with her friends, she would seem a bit off. She took dirt bathes with them but didn't seem quite herself. When they would approach her, she would puff up. She's gotten a little better, and sometimes she even comes out of the nesting box on her own, but she's still not the same. At first, I thought it was broodiness, but she doesn't seem to care when I take the other hens eggs that she sits on. (We have multiple nesting boxes but they all prefer the same one). Around the same time she started acting strange, she lost her best friend, Alice, to old age. We adopted Henrietta and were told she was found in a not so nice neck of the woods in the city. When we brought her into our flock, Alice was the first hen she bonded with. Is she depressed because of Alice's death? Could it have brought back memories from her past? She was always very outgoing and friendly before this happened.