Quote:
Trust me! You are
never going to see that stone again!! Just consider that your little girl now has a grinding stone in her gizzard that will last her entire life, may it be a long and healthy one!!
Yes, our babies eat some of the strangest things! I've watched my girls eat rocks (that's actually rather normal but the size of some of them startles me from time to time) twigs, little bits of copper wire on the ground around the house we are building, STYROFOAM for crying out loud!!!
No joke! I had a block of Styrofoam over in the "toy shed" that I had kept for some reason or another (that reason now escapes me
) and the three little BR's, Rachel, Rosie and LizzyBeth had discovered it. They had made significant inroads into the consumption of it before I had discovered what they were doing. They've been none the worse for wear, but it wouldn't surprise me if they would float like a cork if they ever fell in a bucket of water!
While it's no laughing matter for we humans when our birds ingest materials that we consider foreign, and therefore dangerous, we sometimes just have to trust that free range birds know what will hurt them and what won't. At least that's my fervent hope!
We did have an incident this last spring where my husband had found a small newt under a rock he was removing from the yard. Not thinking for a moment that it might be dangerous to the girls, he called them over and tossed it to them.
The melee immediately ensued and Mavis won, or rather lost, the race for the newt. I wasn't home at the time. I'd like to think that had I been, Denny would have at least asked me if I thought it was safe to give it to them. Bells would have gone off in my head with some memory that newts are poisonous. Maybe Mavis would still be with us. As it was, within less than two hours of her ingesting the newt, she was dead.
I think sometimes they trust us too much that anything being tossed in their direction is safe and therefor they needn't question the palatability of what is offered. I'd like to think that like Yellow Jacket wasps, the girls would have known to leave a newt alone, recognizing it for the hazard it was.
But, as for swallowing a diamond, I think you're little pullet will be just fine. Who knows though. Keep an eye on her droppings. You might just get lucky! Let us know how it *ahem* goes!
