It seems like I have been posting about my chickens all summer. ...well actually I have. It all started when my sweet little alpha hen Lily died in April. I still don’t know what it was. She separated herself from the flock and started laying around in the yard. I took her to the vet twice. The second trip she died in the vets office! Her temp was 109 and the vet said her lungs sounded like she had pneumonia. I will always feel like I contributed to her death. The last vet visit we had to wait for over an hour. The tv was blaring and dogs barking, I think it was too stressful for her body to take. I had given her 2 runs of antibiotics between those two visits to the vet. So the other girls seemed lost for a time. Obviously looking for her at first, their feed intake dropped, and they just seemed depressed. But gradually another of my hens Blossum assumed the alpha role. And everything started being normal again. I knew that Blossum had respiratory issues but she did well unless she was stressed then she would start mouth breathing, but no other symptoms. Then we had this extremely hot spell in September and she became very symptomatic. Mouth breathing, and she separated herself from the flock and started laying along the fence. I tried everything. Put fans on her, holding food morsels in my hand, giving her water with an eye dropper, and even injectable Tylan but it didn’t resolve like it always had before. I took her to the rudest vet I have ever seen (but that is another story) He did a chest X-ray at my insistence and he told me her lungs were full of tumors, she had lice really bad and she should be euthanized. That really set me back on my heels. It took me 20 minutes in the car crying before I could compose myself enough to drive home. So now I am down to 3 chickens. The ones I lost were so loved and while I love the other 3 girls they are just so skittish, they will hardly let you get close to them. All of them have been low man on the totem pole at one time. I have wormed them and scrubbed down the henhouse and saturated everything with Oxine. There has not been a consensus yet as to who will be the alpha hen. They seem rudderless. Plus one of them has had a bald red bulging place below their vent since summer. It doesn’t drain or bleed and I have posted about it here and have tried some of the suggested remedies but so far there is no improvement but when you don’t know what the cause is you don’t know how to treat it. And I have spent over $1K at the vets office over the summer and I just don’t have the funds to take her to the vet. Now 2 of the 3 are having a very hard molt. I can tell they don’t feel well. They are not eating near as much so I have changed them to a 23% protein feed and am putting pre and probiotic supplements in their water and have oyster shell grit available for them. This morning when I let them out I threw out a couple of handfuls of the usual cracked corn, whole oats and mealworms. They grazed and maybe ate 1/4 of it and ignored the ear of corn I put out (which they normally go crazy over). And they went up to the corner of the yard and bedded down in the huge pile of leaves I have composting. (As they have been They free range). I won’t see them again until late afternoon. I am thinking that if things continue in this pattern pretty soon I won’t have any hens. And I absolutely love having them as pets. I have been having a streak of bad luck here. I won’t cull them but any suggestions as to where I should go from here?
