My oldest EE hen, Big Girl (she hangs out with bantams so it's only natural we call her that =) ) didn't lay all summer. She finished a moult at the end of spring/early summer and then just lived life without getting back to the business of laying eggs. I checked her vent and it was dry and puckered. She's 3 so I wasn't entirely surprised. In the middle of summer, she developed a great wound just below her vent that had maggots in it. My guess was a burst abscess. Sounds yucky (and it was) but the maggots cleaned it out right nice for me. I debrided it and filled it with Neosporin and got antibiotics from the vet. Within in a week it was completely healed. A couple of weeks ago, we noticed that Big Girl was starting to spend more time in the nesting box and when I checked her vent it was ripe and ready for laying. Yay! Two weeks later, no eggs, but that little group wanders our property so she could have been laying them anywhere. Today I noticed she was acting funny again--like she was when I discovered her wound. I picked her up and checked her over and found that her cloaca was very mildly prolapsed and her abdomen was lumpy and hard. Uh oh, eggbound. =( I brought her inside and set to work. What I found in there was like something from a horror film. I couldn't even take pictures, it was so yucky. The "eggs" were not even like eggs. She had one long, continuous, mass of rubbery shell and hard yolk that twisted and turned up the length of her oviduct. The end of it broke off (the piece appeared to have been one "egg" and I got it out. I tried to get what was left, but she was in agony and swelling, making it difficult. Plus, the shape of what was left was just too hard to get out. I put her back in chicken "hospital" where she has a hot water bottle to sit on and am hoping that perhaps she can push that thing out on her own now that it is smaller. If not, I'll have my husband cull her when he gets home. She's miserable, poor thing. =( Not looking for advice, just wanted to "vent" my sadness...
