Did I get dealt a crap hand or….?

[Dynamissa]

Just curious, what hatchery did they come from ?

I got mine from a feed store associated with Agway, they took orders for breeds. I want to say they came in a Hoover hatchery box?

 

[steve232]

The reason I was asking I got 15 chick's from a hatchery a year ago. Everything was going really good till they got to about 4 or 5 months old and almost all of them one by one would become lethargic lose weight and die while all the others in my flock was fine. Out of the 10 buff orpingtons I have 3 hens still alive and out of 5 buckeyes I still have 2. Sometimes things are just hard to explain.

 

[DonyaQuick]

I got mine from a feed store associated with Agway, they took orders for breeds. I want to say they came in a Hoover hatchery box?

Hoovers supplies my local TSC too. I can't speak to their Delawares but of the original 6 BO pullets I started with four years ago, I only have two left and only one really has had zero reproductive issues. Three of them died directly from reproductive issues and the other had some other kind of organ failure. You could be at least partly up against genetic issues for birds that simply aren't meant to live a long time within a 1-2 year eggs-then-stew cycle (I didn't know some hatchery's BO's fell into that category when I started). I later got some "olive eggers" from the same source; they all seem much reproductively hardier but are fundamentally a cross and definitely not production birds.

As of a week or so she hasn’t laid at all and now she dropping feathers. She’s acting normal right now but my other girl was as well right up until she wasn’t. No weird posture no weird poop no nothing.

I'm in NY too; my birds all started molting this month. I blame dingy weather this year since they normally wait until around October or later. Hopefully that's all yours that's droping feathers is doing too! Stopping laying to molt is actually a really good thing; it's much harder on them if they continue laying through it.

I’ve got another girl who always had meat spots in her eggs but she laid daily up until a couple months ago .. it was the nasty heat wave in the northeast with high humidity and high temps. I thought that was the problem. Suddenly her eggs were GARGANTUAN and the shell was messed up. Then they were thin shelled. Then shelless. Then breaking on the way out.

Not to diminish the possible other health issues that your birds could be facing, but the horrible heat earlier in the year caused a round of wonky eggs in my birds too. Shell quality dropped, I had some soft shells, and it was tough on them. This was true even for hardy birds that have shown no other issues. Environmental stress can really affect the egg process. It could well have caused your hen's system to go haywire if she was already prone to having some issues. If I read right that this is the bird that has now stopped laying and is dropping feathers, then it does sound like the combined stress probably triggered a molt.

 

[Appalachickens]

I'm very new to this and my girls have not yet laid any eggs (although I've spoken sternly to the 18-week olds to get on the stick) but I have to ask - what in the world is an implant?