Recent content by DownEastChickens

re: follow-up on question of feed and roxarsone/arsenic: I'm not seeing that roxarsone is listed in the ingredient list of Blue Seal Layer Pellets...

Glenda -- I was busy posting the pictures while your message came in, so our postings "crossed"! The lumps do look cyst-like...that was one term that hadn't come to mind! We raised our flock on organic feed for over the first two years of their lives and then, about six months ago, the...

I'm trying to paste in photos of the hens feet [may have to try a second time as I'm not sure I'm doing it right!]. The hen went on later this afternoon to start roaming in the yard and digging in some dirt -- what turned out to be my effort to give the chicken a peaceful Last Day ended up to...

My husband's got the digital camera today, but may be back before much longer, so I can take pictures then... Just checked on her again: she's moved about twenty feet to lay down in the shade of another tree. Head's up and a little perkier. I think the extreme listlessness earlier...

Scaly leg mites.... just checked for more descriptions in my chicken book: I'm not seeing overall swelling of leg/foot and definitely not seeing any sort of crusting as pictured. While I am always concerned about mites of different sorts, if the symptoms I read about are key, I don't think...

I've got a 3-year old Buff Orpington with a health condition I can't track down in my _Chicken Health Handbook_: At least three weeks ago, the hen started looking mopey, head and tail down, looking peaked. She hung around the coop but was still eating, could walk OK when she did... I knew that...

Update on this situation, in case anyone else ever has a rooster who singles out a hen for destruction: I spent a couple of weeks shuttling around the hen every day, securing her in a separate enclosure inside the coop with the rest overnight and then letting her roam free in the yard, getting...

Thanks for these responses today! After going after the hen several times, the rooster seems to be escalating, and the hen not giving whatever signals would indicate she's going to give in. I think you are right, MissPrissy, that she would give in one way or another, but I have seen two...

This might have been a "behavior" forum posting, if there weren't such severe injuries involved... We have a flock of 15 chickens, including just one rooster. The rooster and five hens were hatched last August by an older Buff Orpington who went broody over the summer. We didn't have a...

We've had four batches of chickens over the past eight or so years, each time starting with about twenty: The first two batches were raised for meat, and we kept them for only for about five months. The second two batches have been for eggs, a mix of varieties, and kept longer, so I'm getting...