The last thing any chicken keeper wants to see is a favorite hen standing helplessly in a nest box with a frightening prolapse hanging out of her vent, dripping viscous fluids. Worse, she may be in the run and other chickens may have already pecked at the prolapse, literally adding insult to injury.
This is a scene I have experienced, and it’s definitely not something I would wish on anyone, though it taught me a lot. I’m going to share all that with you, and if you ever come across one of your hens in this state, you will not panic. You will know exactly what to do.
Before we get to that, I’d like to begin at the beginning and teach you how to recognize when your hen may be at the very beginning of a reproductive crisis, and hopefully, you will be able to notice she is in trouble long before she slides down that slippery slope.
Spy on your hens
Most chicken keepers don’t pay a lot of attention to the daily trips their hens make to the nest boxes to lay their eggs. I happen to spend a lot of time with my chickens, and I have become unconsciously aware of about how long each usually spends in the nest before laying her egg. One hen, an EE/Cream Legbar mix named Ladybug, is in and out of the nest in less than five minutes.
One day, Ladybug was taking much longer than her usual in-and-out, so I took a peek at her. She was standing up which a hen usually does as she’s about to expel the egg, but Ladybug seemed to be straining and her beak was gaping like she was exhausted.
I decided to give her five more minutes. When I returned, she was still standing and straining. I keep a bottle of calcium citrate with D3 in the run, and I popped a tablet into her beak and left. A half hour later she had laid her egg, and was her old chipper self again.
Ladybug
The signs of a hen in trouble
Two years ago at the beginning of spring, my EE hen Ethel had a problem with very thin shell eggs. She was around six at the time, and one day I saw one of these thin shell eggs collapsed and hanging out of her vent. She had stuffed herself into a corner of the run and was crouching with her tail held low and flat. Little did I know that she was starting on an extended binge of releasing two eggs down her oviduct at the same time.
This is not a good thing. Neither are giant double yolk eggs. It may seem like a bounty, but hens that are doubling up like this will eventually come to grief.
In the first case, two eggs coming down during the same cycle almost always run into trouble when a shell gets wrapped around one egg in the shell gland while the second egg goes without, resulting in a shell-less egg which is much more difficult for a hen to pass. With double yolk eggs, they are more apt to cause egg binding due to their huge size.
Double yolk eggs
The first time I ever encountered this was back when I was very new to chicken keeping and I had an EE hen Rachel suffer egg binding. She was a notorious double yolk egg layer. I had just joined BYC, so I had read about egg binding and how to treat it with a warm soak followed by rest in a quiet place. After she passed the egg, I was very happy that her ordeal was over, but for some reason, I decided to let her rest in the crate a while longer.
I came back an hour later to release her, and I found a “rubber” shell-less egg in the crate. It was the first time I had ever encountered the notion of a hen laying two eggs within such a short time of each other. Had I known then the value of calcium to treat this condition, I would have given her a calcium tablet each day for a period to regulate her cycle and strengthen her shells. Since then, I now know that this double egg laying is more common than people think.
Double egg laying
Getting back to Ethel the EE who was embarking on a double egg binge, I started her on daily calcium citrate with D3 immediately upon seeing the collapsed egg hanging from her vent. She was acting sick, tail held low and flat, panting, eyes red-rimmed and tired. I started her on an antibiotic just in case the collapsed egg left remnants of yolk behind. Yolk is a perfect bacteria growing medium, and infection can set in very quickly. Because of this danger, I usually give such a hen a round of a broad spectrum antibiotic such as penicillin or amoxicillin.
A few hours later, Ethel passed a shell-less egg. The transformation was immediate. She felt so much better and was quickly returning to normal. But her eggs weren’t. Despite the calcium tablet each day, the double laying continued. This went on for a month until finally the calcium reset her cycle and she has been producing a single egg per cycle ever since.
Calcium in this strength, 630mg, is not recommended for much longer than a few weeks straight as it can be hard on the kidneys. It also causes calcium deposits on the egg shells which are ugly if you are peddling your eggs as I do. But I decided Ethel was doomed to chronic reproductive tract disorders unless I pushed this thing until I got the result I wanted. Thankfully it paid off, and while she had calcium warts on her eggs for weeks afterward, she has not reverted back to double egg laying.
The worst sort of egg binding - prolapse
These egg issues can happen to any hen of any age, new layers, seasoned layers, and even very old hens that have appeared to stop laying. Lilith is the second to the oldest hen in my flock at age eleven. Lilith is a Wyandotte, a very prolific egg laying breed, besides having one of the most eye catching plumage.
When Lilith decided to retire from egg laying around age eight, she would still lay a few eggs at the beginning of every spring season. But then she finally got so old that these spring egg splurges were producing only shell-less eggs. It was just a matter of time before her luck ran out and one of these shell-less wonders got stuck.
At age ten, she finally drew the short straw and became egg bound. Not only that, but she prolapsed on top of it. At this advanced age, not many hens can survive such an intense reproductive crisis.
I found her in the run with the prolapse hanging from her vent. It resembled hamburger since the others had taken nips on the juicy red tissue. Lilith was in a lot of pain and distress. Fluids were running like a faucet out of her vent. I scooped her up and took her inside and gave her a calcium tablet as the first step. Then she got a cleansing soak to wash away dirt and blood and feces. It was early spring and still quite cold here in the southern Rockies so she got blow dried.
Next I dealt with the prolapse. I had assembled some soft tissues, witch hazel (a soothing astringent), a tube of antibiotic ointment, Vetericyn spray, and a tube of cortisone cream.
I soaked a tissue with witch hazel and gently placed the wet tissue against the prolapse, letting it soothe the tissue, then gently used the soaked tissue to push the prolapse back in. It wouldn’t go. Pushing on it just made her want to strain harder to try to expel the blocked egg. So I sprayed her vent with Vetericyn, let it dry, dabbed a bit of antibiotic ointment on the injured portion where it had been pecked, then smoothed cortisone cream over the entire prolapse to reduce pain and swelling. Then I installed her in a crate on a thick warm towel right from the clothes drier and a heating pad under that.
I left her to rest quietly with some water to drink and dry feed if she was hungry. I returned every hour to check on her. She was losing fluids like crazy. She was drinking a lot of water. I was surprised at how much, but the towels were fast becoming saturated, so it wasn’t surprising she was so thirsty.
What happens to poop when an egg is stuck
That night I did some Google surfing and learned some things I had never known that have really helped me understand what happens when a hen gets blocked with a stuck egg. Depending where the egg is in the oviduct when it gets stuck, a hen may be totally or partially unable to poop. This can back up poop and it can kill a hen in 24 to 48 hours.
But usually, unless the egg is right up against the vent, the blockage is partial and some poop gets through. But not cecal poop. Cecal poop is produced in the cecum. It’s that chocolate pudding poop that smells worse than anything else coming out of a chicken’s butt. But that isn’t all that happens in the cecum. It happens to be where excess fluids not absorbed in the intestines are distributed throughout the chicken’s tissues, doing more than anything else to keep her hydrated and healthy. This function is blocked when there’s a stuck egg, so the fluids are expelled instead, quickly dehydrating a hen, further adding to the things conspiring to kill her. This dripping fluid from the vent is one of the signs a hen may have an egg blockage.
By morning, the towel under Lilith was soaked with these bodily fluids, and she had drunk all the water in her tray on the door. But I was relieved to see she had survived the night. She smelled unpleasantly acrid from the fluids soaking the towel, the prolapse was also still present in all its splendor, and she needed a bath to clean up the slimy white nitrates that soaked her butt fluff. Before I started in on the cleanup, she got another calcium tablet to strengthen her contractions. The prolapse wasn’t going to go back inside, I realized, as long as she had an egg stuck.
I repeated all of the steps to treat the prolapse as I did the day before. I repeated them again two or three times that day. This went on for a week, and finally I found a crushed and twisted membrane on the towel and her prolapse had gone back in of its own accord. And, by the way, cecal poop began to appear. Lilith’s long ordeal was over!
At the beginning of this ordeal, I had started Lilith on amoxicillin, 250mg per day. I continued that for another few days for a total of ten days. Lilith made a full recovery.
This past spring, Lilith showed off by laying a perfect egg with perfect shell, even though the egg was shaped a bit differently. But Lilith couldn’t just leave it at that. She had just turned eleven, and she must have thought she was some spring chicken set to try to lay as many eggs as possible. The inevitable happened. Another stuck egg and another miserable prolapse. This time we both were seasoned veterans at dealing with this, so we followed all the steps, Calcium, antibiotic, cortisone, etc. But it would take nearly three weeks this time for it to resolve.
It’s truly remarkable Lilith has survived all this and is still enjoying life with her club of old biddies, one a year older and two hens a year younger than she is. None, however, feel the need to prove they can still lay eggs when each spring arrives. Lilith alone has that distinction, thankfully.
Ethel on the left, Lilith on the right
The different forms of calcium
Before I end this, I want to talk about the different kinds of calcium and why I use calcium citrate the minute I see a hen in obvious reproductive trouble. This can happen even though a hen has access to oyster shell and a balanced diet provided by a good commercial feed.
Oyster shell is calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate form of calcium is the highest concentration of calcium there is and the most common, but it’s not easy to digest. Each hen will digest and absorb this form of calcium at a somewhat different rate, and some can fall short, triggering egg issues. You might notice your hen's eggs are having thinner shells. Or she may lay a rubber egg, an egg with no shell, just a membrane. This is a huge red flag that she needs a calcium boost.
This is where calcium citrate comes in. Calcium citrate comes from the industrial process to make citric acid. It makes calcium extremely easy to digest. While the calcium concentration in the citrate form is less than the carbonate form, calcium citrate is the most easily and most quickly absorbed. When a hen is having a reproductive crisis, getting a quick blast of calcium into her system is top priority. While a Tums antacid tablet, which is calcium carbonate, will work, it doesn’t work as fast as calcium citrate does. When a hen is in an egg crisis, fast is best. There is a third form of calcium, calcium gluconate, derived from plants, fruits and honey, but it’s so low in calcium concentration, it’s worthless for treating a hen in a reproductive crisis. Forget it. Use either the citrate or carbonate forms.
When you can see and feel the stuck egg
This is something I’ve never experienced with any of my egg bound hens. But I’ve seen a lot of these cases here on BYC. This is one of the most critical instances of egg binding. Do not cut into the vent tissue to help release the egg. This exposes the hen to risk of infection and it’s an impossible area to try to treat for injury and stitches won’t hold.
You can use a lubricant on the taut tissue around the egg. Or fill an oral syringe with warm water with a drop of Dawn detergent in it to squirt on the vent to hydrate the tissue, and if you can get it between the egg and the tissue, even better. Only as a last resort, make a small hole in the egg and use an oral syringe to suck all of the egg contents out. The egg may then collapse on its own or you may have to do it. But if the shell collapses in pieces, you will need to fish each and every piece out or they can cut her up inside the vent. This is why we almost never want to collapse an egg on purpose.
Learn to recognize the signs
In conclusion, it’s better to train yourself to recognize a hen in distress before she gets neck deep in crisis. A hen stuffed into a corner in the run with her tail held low and flat is in trouble. A hen standing and straining in a nest box for an hour or more is in trouble. A hen with a twisted membrane hanging from her vent is in trouble. And obviously, a hen with a prolapse is in very serious trouble and needs to be isolated immediately.
In each and every case, the very first step to helping your hen is to give her one tablet of calcium citrate. Buy it and leave it in the coop or run so it will always be handy at a moment’s notice.
This is a scene I have experienced, and it’s definitely not something I would wish on anyone, though it taught me a lot. I’m going to share all that with you, and if you ever come across one of your hens in this state, you will not panic. You will know exactly what to do.
Before we get to that, I’d like to begin at the beginning and teach you how to recognize when your hen may be at the very beginning of a reproductive crisis, and hopefully, you will be able to notice she is in trouble long before she slides down that slippery slope.
Spy on your hens
Most chicken keepers don’t pay a lot of attention to the daily trips their hens make to the nest boxes to lay their eggs. I happen to spend a lot of time with my chickens, and I have become unconsciously aware of about how long each usually spends in the nest before laying her egg. One hen, an EE/Cream Legbar mix named Ladybug, is in and out of the nest in less than five minutes.
One day, Ladybug was taking much longer than her usual in-and-out, so I took a peek at her. She was standing up which a hen usually does as she’s about to expel the egg, but Ladybug seemed to be straining and her beak was gaping like she was exhausted.
I decided to give her five more minutes. When I returned, she was still standing and straining. I keep a bottle of calcium citrate with D3 in the run, and I popped a tablet into her beak and left. A half hour later she had laid her egg, and was her old chipper self again.
Ladybug
The signs of a hen in trouble
Two years ago at the beginning of spring, my EE hen Ethel had a problem with very thin shell eggs. She was around six at the time, and one day I saw one of these thin shell eggs collapsed and hanging out of her vent. She had stuffed herself into a corner of the run and was crouching with her tail held low and flat. Little did I know that she was starting on an extended binge of releasing two eggs down her oviduct at the same time.
This is not a good thing. Neither are giant double yolk eggs. It may seem like a bounty, but hens that are doubling up like this will eventually come to grief.
In the first case, two eggs coming down during the same cycle almost always run into trouble when a shell gets wrapped around one egg in the shell gland while the second egg goes without, resulting in a shell-less egg which is much more difficult for a hen to pass. With double yolk eggs, they are more apt to cause egg binding due to their huge size.
Double yolk eggs
The first time I ever encountered this was back when I was very new to chicken keeping and I had an EE hen Rachel suffer egg binding. She was a notorious double yolk egg layer. I had just joined BYC, so I had read about egg binding and how to treat it with a warm soak followed by rest in a quiet place. After she passed the egg, I was very happy that her ordeal was over, but for some reason, I decided to let her rest in the crate a while longer.
I came back an hour later to release her, and I found a “rubber” shell-less egg in the crate. It was the first time I had ever encountered the notion of a hen laying two eggs within such a short time of each other. Had I known then the value of calcium to treat this condition, I would have given her a calcium tablet each day for a period to regulate her cycle and strengthen her shells. Since then, I now know that this double egg laying is more common than people think.
Double egg laying
Getting back to Ethel the EE who was embarking on a double egg binge, I started her on daily calcium citrate with D3 immediately upon seeing the collapsed egg hanging from her vent. She was acting sick, tail held low and flat, panting, eyes red-rimmed and tired. I started her on an antibiotic just in case the collapsed egg left remnants of yolk behind. Yolk is a perfect bacteria growing medium, and infection can set in very quickly. Because of this danger, I usually give such a hen a round of a broad spectrum antibiotic such as penicillin or amoxicillin.
A few hours later, Ethel passed a shell-less egg. The transformation was immediate. She felt so much better and was quickly returning to normal. But her eggs weren’t. Despite the calcium tablet each day, the double laying continued. This went on for a month until finally the calcium reset her cycle and she has been producing a single egg per cycle ever since.
Calcium in this strength, 630mg, is not recommended for much longer than a few weeks straight as it can be hard on the kidneys. It also causes calcium deposits on the egg shells which are ugly if you are peddling your eggs as I do. But I decided Ethel was doomed to chronic reproductive tract disorders unless I pushed this thing until I got the result I wanted. Thankfully it paid off, and while she had calcium warts on her eggs for weeks afterward, she has not reverted back to double egg laying.
The worst sort of egg binding - prolapse
These egg issues can happen to any hen of any age, new layers, seasoned layers, and even very old hens that have appeared to stop laying. Lilith is the second to the oldest hen in my flock at age eleven. Lilith is a Wyandotte, a very prolific egg laying breed, besides having one of the most eye catching plumage.
When Lilith decided to retire from egg laying around age eight, she would still lay a few eggs at the beginning of every spring season. But then she finally got so old that these spring egg splurges were producing only shell-less eggs. It was just a matter of time before her luck ran out and one of these shell-less wonders got stuck.
At age ten, she finally drew the short straw and became egg bound. Not only that, but she prolapsed on top of it. At this advanced age, not many hens can survive such an intense reproductive crisis.
I found her in the run with the prolapse hanging from her vent. It resembled hamburger since the others had taken nips on the juicy red tissue. Lilith was in a lot of pain and distress. Fluids were running like a faucet out of her vent. I scooped her up and took her inside and gave her a calcium tablet as the first step. Then she got a cleansing soak to wash away dirt and blood and feces. It was early spring and still quite cold here in the southern Rockies so she got blow dried.
Next I dealt with the prolapse. I had assembled some soft tissues, witch hazel (a soothing astringent), a tube of antibiotic ointment, Vetericyn spray, and a tube of cortisone cream.
I soaked a tissue with witch hazel and gently placed the wet tissue against the prolapse, letting it soothe the tissue, then gently used the soaked tissue to push the prolapse back in. It wouldn’t go. Pushing on it just made her want to strain harder to try to expel the blocked egg. So I sprayed her vent with Vetericyn, let it dry, dabbed a bit of antibiotic ointment on the injured portion where it had been pecked, then smoothed cortisone cream over the entire prolapse to reduce pain and swelling. Then I installed her in a crate on a thick warm towel right from the clothes drier and a heating pad under that.
I left her to rest quietly with some water to drink and dry feed if she was hungry. I returned every hour to check on her. She was losing fluids like crazy. She was drinking a lot of water. I was surprised at how much, but the towels were fast becoming saturated, so it wasn’t surprising she was so thirsty.
What happens to poop when an egg is stuck
That night I did some Google surfing and learned some things I had never known that have really helped me understand what happens when a hen gets blocked with a stuck egg. Depending where the egg is in the oviduct when it gets stuck, a hen may be totally or partially unable to poop. This can back up poop and it can kill a hen in 24 to 48 hours.
But usually, unless the egg is right up against the vent, the blockage is partial and some poop gets through. But not cecal poop. Cecal poop is produced in the cecum. It’s that chocolate pudding poop that smells worse than anything else coming out of a chicken’s butt. But that isn’t all that happens in the cecum. It happens to be where excess fluids not absorbed in the intestines are distributed throughout the chicken’s tissues, doing more than anything else to keep her hydrated and healthy. This function is blocked when there’s a stuck egg, so the fluids are expelled instead, quickly dehydrating a hen, further adding to the things conspiring to kill her. This dripping fluid from the vent is one of the signs a hen may have an egg blockage.
By morning, the towel under Lilith was soaked with these bodily fluids, and she had drunk all the water in her tray on the door. But I was relieved to see she had survived the night. She smelled unpleasantly acrid from the fluids soaking the towel, the prolapse was also still present in all its splendor, and she needed a bath to clean up the slimy white nitrates that soaked her butt fluff. Before I started in on the cleanup, she got another calcium tablet to strengthen her contractions. The prolapse wasn’t going to go back inside, I realized, as long as she had an egg stuck.
I repeated all of the steps to treat the prolapse as I did the day before. I repeated them again two or three times that day. This went on for a week, and finally I found a crushed and twisted membrane on the towel and her prolapse had gone back in of its own accord. And, by the way, cecal poop began to appear. Lilith’s long ordeal was over!
At the beginning of this ordeal, I had started Lilith on amoxicillin, 250mg per day. I continued that for another few days for a total of ten days. Lilith made a full recovery.
This past spring, Lilith showed off by laying a perfect egg with perfect shell, even though the egg was shaped a bit differently. But Lilith couldn’t just leave it at that. She had just turned eleven, and she must have thought she was some spring chicken set to try to lay as many eggs as possible. The inevitable happened. Another stuck egg and another miserable prolapse. This time we both were seasoned veterans at dealing with this, so we followed all the steps, Calcium, antibiotic, cortisone, etc. But it would take nearly three weeks this time for it to resolve.
It’s truly remarkable Lilith has survived all this and is still enjoying life with her club of old biddies, one a year older and two hens a year younger than she is. None, however, feel the need to prove they can still lay eggs when each spring arrives. Lilith alone has that distinction, thankfully.
Ethel on the left, Lilith on the right
The different forms of calcium
Before I end this, I want to talk about the different kinds of calcium and why I use calcium citrate the minute I see a hen in obvious reproductive trouble. This can happen even though a hen has access to oyster shell and a balanced diet provided by a good commercial feed.
Oyster shell is calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate form of calcium is the highest concentration of calcium there is and the most common, but it’s not easy to digest. Each hen will digest and absorb this form of calcium at a somewhat different rate, and some can fall short, triggering egg issues. You might notice your hen's eggs are having thinner shells. Or she may lay a rubber egg, an egg with no shell, just a membrane. This is a huge red flag that she needs a calcium boost.
This is where calcium citrate comes in. Calcium citrate comes from the industrial process to make citric acid. It makes calcium extremely easy to digest. While the calcium concentration in the citrate form is less than the carbonate form, calcium citrate is the most easily and most quickly absorbed. When a hen is having a reproductive crisis, getting a quick blast of calcium into her system is top priority. While a Tums antacid tablet, which is calcium carbonate, will work, it doesn’t work as fast as calcium citrate does. When a hen is in an egg crisis, fast is best. There is a third form of calcium, calcium gluconate, derived from plants, fruits and honey, but it’s so low in calcium concentration, it’s worthless for treating a hen in a reproductive crisis. Forget it. Use either the citrate or carbonate forms.
When you can see and feel the stuck egg
This is something I’ve never experienced with any of my egg bound hens. But I’ve seen a lot of these cases here on BYC. This is one of the most critical instances of egg binding. Do not cut into the vent tissue to help release the egg. This exposes the hen to risk of infection and it’s an impossible area to try to treat for injury and stitches won’t hold.
You can use a lubricant on the taut tissue around the egg. Or fill an oral syringe with warm water with a drop of Dawn detergent in it to squirt on the vent to hydrate the tissue, and if you can get it between the egg and the tissue, even better. Only as a last resort, make a small hole in the egg and use an oral syringe to suck all of the egg contents out. The egg may then collapse on its own or you may have to do it. But if the shell collapses in pieces, you will need to fish each and every piece out or they can cut her up inside the vent. This is why we almost never want to collapse an egg on purpose.
Learn to recognize the signs
In conclusion, it’s better to train yourself to recognize a hen in distress before she gets neck deep in crisis. A hen stuffed into a corner in the run with her tail held low and flat is in trouble. A hen standing and straining in a nest box for an hour or more is in trouble. A hen with a twisted membrane hanging from her vent is in trouble. And obviously, a hen with a prolapse is in very serious trouble and needs to be isolated immediately.
In each and every case, the very first step to helping your hen is to give her one tablet of calcium citrate. Buy it and leave it in the coop or run so it will always be handy at a moment’s notice.
