Well...not really the most wonderful start to the new year. Things seem to have turned out ok but yetserday was not looking good.
I think I'm done with the thing of feeding all flock and then relying on my hens supplementing calcium on on their own via limestone/oystershell/whatever else. With hardy hens laying smaller eggs less frequently, maybe that's totally fine. Or maybe it's fine if you don't mind losing a bird here or there to egg binding if they don't eat the oyster shell. I will of course try to select for the hardy case when breeding but I'm not ok losing a bird or having it be ill just because it won't eat things in exactly the right ratios. My original BOs were clearly bred for more laying in their early years even if not the level of egg-making as true production breeds. Of the four of those hens I still have, two of them chow down on the calcium supplements voluntarily, one of them eats the minimum so her shells have been getting noticably thinner as the eggs have been getting bigger although they're still technically ok...and Miss Chungus is the 4th and she has real issues eating any kind of calcium supplement that isn't disguised as a non-rock food item. I don't know what about it bothers her, but she has never been a fan of anything I've tried for free-choice calcium. She'll eat a very small amount of the supplements now and then, but she always did best on just layer feed. I never had any issues with her and calcium up until I had to switch to 100% all flock (originally due to supply chain issues), and since then I've had occasional soft shell or extremely thin shell issues with her since then which I've tried to mitigate through supplementation and sometimes just mixing layer feed into what the flock gets. If I'm sneaky and give her, say, a calcium powder supplemented mash with something tasty mixed in like a bit of tuna...she eats it readily and the shell thickness is good. But I have to do that daily. And eventually she gets tired of whatever the current trick is and I have to figure out something else.
Yesterday, Chungus just waited by the run door during morning hug time. Very unusual. I took her in as soon as I saw that since something was obviously off, although I may never know exactly what. I spent that afternoon and evening periodically giving her a calcium citrate suspension by pipette in case it was egg binding. Calcium citrate dissolves better than carbonate but still pretty poorly, but stirring it up before putting it into the pipette still gets a decent amount of it per drop. She would take fluids that way and did drink some water on her own, but she wouldn't eat and was having trouble pooping - which can either be a gut impaction or egg binding. Her crop was fine and emptying. The calcium seemed to help get things moving out within a few hours, and then she started eating again. I kept her in the house overnight; it's entirely possible she laid a soft shelled egg and ate it, thereby erasing any evidence, but also just as possible she had impacted vegetation based on what I saw coming out this morning. So, no way to know what it was for sure but the calcium definitely seemed necessary. Either way, she's much improved and is back to her bouncy self as of this afternoon and actually got so bouncy and chaotic that I had to take her back outside.
Anyway, I've got 14 hens in the main flock now...I'm just going to do layer feed for them. When I've accidentally given more layer feed in the mix, I have noticed better membranes even for birds that eat plenty of calcium on the side. For my birds at least, it just seems much harder to supplement calcium and whatever other trace nutrients layers need for some hens than it is to just give them what they need in an error-proof way and then supplement protein on the side. Easier to give some leftover fish periodically than what I've been doing so far. I'll keep the bachelor flock on all flock and will of course use that for chicks and broody hens in the future, but the big rooster brothers with the main flock will be getting more layer feed since I don't have a way to feed them separately. I know some people get weird about giving roosters layer feed, but I've literally seen my roos eat the calcium rocks too in non-trivial quantities on a regular basis, so I can't think layer feed is actually
that bad for them if they'll boluntarily eat extra calcium anyway. So...time to transition to layer feed for the main flock.
