Hello everyone! My name is Abby, and this is Gidget, my five year old Easter Egger hen.
Or more accurately, I should say that was Gidget. This is my little girl now.
First, a little backstory. I got Gidget and her nine hatch mates back in 2018, my second group of chickens. They all, quite amazingly, as I bought them straight run, ended up pullets. So my family and I got a ton of eggs for a while! When Gidget was a year old, she went through her first full molt that fall, just like everyone else. That spring, though, she didn't start laying again. For three years. This spring, she surprised me with eggs! She's been a consistent layer, and lays cute tiny green eggs.
But now for the real reason I started this thread. In May, I noticed Gidget's left eye was slightly cloudy. I dismissed it as a ridiculous thought, but I kept close watch on her. And sure enough, as I feared, the eye kept getting cloudier. Pretty soon the entire pupil was light blue, and, to my dismay, the other eye was becoming affected as well. It kept relentlessly getting worse, but Gidget didn't seem to care. She found the food and water okay, jumped onto the roost and into the nesting boxes without an issue, and kept on laying her little eggs. Fast forward to now. She's still managing the daily necessities, but her eyesight clearly affects her. She finds things by bumping into them, and her depth perception is quite off. She often tries to peck at something on the ground, but can't tell where it is and ends up pecking the air. She adjusts fast though, and manages to get her share of melon rinds and such. If it's big and a contrasting color, she'll eat it. Unfortunately that means she often tries to eat me.
If I give her a treat, she'll follow me around, begging for more, and pecking me if I don't give her anything. She's quite the greedy little girl.
Anyway, Gidget is now nearly completely blind, and can barely sense light and dark. She still enjoys life, is the first to greet me in the morning, and loves perching on my foot, because then she knows I'm right there with her.
This thread is intended to be a chronicle of Gidget's day-to-day life, describing how I deal with a blind chicken, and how she deals with life. Feel free to follow along!
~Abby
Or more accurately, I should say that was Gidget. This is my little girl now.
First, a little backstory. I got Gidget and her nine hatch mates back in 2018, my second group of chickens. They all, quite amazingly, as I bought them straight run, ended up pullets. So my family and I got a ton of eggs for a while! When Gidget was a year old, she went through her first full molt that fall, just like everyone else. That spring, though, she didn't start laying again. For three years. This spring, she surprised me with eggs! She's been a consistent layer, and lays cute tiny green eggs.
But now for the real reason I started this thread. In May, I noticed Gidget's left eye was slightly cloudy. I dismissed it as a ridiculous thought, but I kept close watch on her. And sure enough, as I feared, the eye kept getting cloudier. Pretty soon the entire pupil was light blue, and, to my dismay, the other eye was becoming affected as well. It kept relentlessly getting worse, but Gidget didn't seem to care. She found the food and water okay, jumped onto the roost and into the nesting boxes without an issue, and kept on laying her little eggs. Fast forward to now. She's still managing the daily necessities, but her eyesight clearly affects her. She finds things by bumping into them, and her depth perception is quite off. She often tries to peck at something on the ground, but can't tell where it is and ends up pecking the air. She adjusts fast though, and manages to get her share of melon rinds and such. If it's big and a contrasting color, she'll eat it. Unfortunately that means she often tries to eat me.
If I give her a treat, she'll follow me around, begging for more, and pecking me if I don't give her anything. She's quite the greedy little girl.Anyway, Gidget is now nearly completely blind, and can barely sense light and dark. She still enjoys life, is the first to greet me in the morning, and loves perching on my foot, because then she knows I'm right there with her.
This thread is intended to be a chronicle of Gidget's day-to-day life, describing how I deal with a blind chicken, and how she deals with life. Feel free to follow along!
~Abby
She’s a tiny hen, and I can pick her up with one hand, but she loves sitting on eggs. I found her on nine before, and she looked like a little pancake all spread out on top of them. I don’t even know how she finds the eggs. Whenever I find her in a box, she’s sitting either on them or on the golf ball, though she can’t even see into the nesting boxes. She must sense them or something 
And she makes the cutest noises when she’s sitting. I’ll have to get a video of her one of these days. She talks to her eggs constantly, purring and clucking to them. It’s so cute.
. But she's growing plenty of little feathers in now, and looks quite bedraggled. Near the end of the summer, she'd lost most of the feathers off the back of her head and neck, due to her not being able to run away from the stupid rooster. Thankfully his affections have slowed down now that she's not laying. Anyway, Gidgy is still able to eat and drink, and I have her food and water in bowls on the floor, which she finds by basically running into them. She does like to roost on the edge of the food bowl, but she's so tiny she doesn't dump it over. She can't get on the roost anymore, and she can't even tell which side of the coop it's on, poor little girl. She can't find scratch on the ground either, but if I put some in my hand and hold it right in front of her face, she'll eventually peck it. She still seems to be loving life, and as long as that's true, she'll be sticking around.
