Hen broke her top beak!

[Tillie43]

My RIR appears to have broke off her top beak at the lip. Her lower beak is intact and she tries to eat and drink. I feed my chickens pellets from two feeders. I switched one to have crumbles available for her. Don’t know what else can be done right now except to monitor her. Will she grow back the beak?

 

[Eggcessive]

Oh no, I am sorry about your hen. Do you know if she was attacked, or if she got it stuck in fencing or how she might have broken it? I doubt if that will grow back, but some chickens can learn to eat with even severe injuries. Some beak injuries can be repaired with empty tea bags and superglue, but there doesn’t look like much to work with. Many use pieces of scrambled egg plus chicken feed made wet with a lot of water in a tall bowl to help them manage to get enough to eat. Tube feeding is also something you may do temporarily until she can eat normally. Hopefully others will chime in with their experience. Many will advise you to put her down, but you may do some reading about some hens who have survived this. The link below is a very successful story of a hen who lost her entire beak but survived and is doing well years later:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/plese-help-chickens-beak-got-bit-off.848424/

 

[SnapdragonQ]

This happened to one of my old hens a few years ago. She had the habit of pecking at ice in the winter even though there was always unfrozen water available for her.
On my hen it had broken off nearly as far back as your hen, but there was still a little flesh left underneath where the beak had been. Thankfully the cold weather was in her favor and flies were not an issue. It was however painful, which was really hard to see as she was normally a very outgoing sassy hen.

I debated heavily what to do and ultimately decided to wait it out and see how she did instead of euthanizing her. Chickens are tough and can survive things we never imagine that they could.
It took a few weeks and some babying to heal, but after that she was perfectly fine and back to her old bossy limping (arthritis) beautiful self sporting her stumpy beak with sass.

 

[Tillie43]

Thanks everyone for such encouraging replies. Shirley seems to be doing quite well eating her crumbles. She seems to always be at the feeder but is going to roost with a full crop. Hopefully it continues.

 

[Shadrach]

While beaks don't grow back, they can and do repair.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1166494/I've had a couple of rescues here that had had their beaks butchered by some idiot.
The problem often is when they break or get cut, it creates small fractures that go up the remaining beak. This can heal.
You might find making a mash helps with the eating. Just enough water added to make a paste.

 

[Eggcessive]

Thanks everyone for such encouraging replies. Shirley seems to be doing quite well eating her crumbles. She seems to always be at the feeder but is going to roost with a full crop. Hopefully it continues.

Very good to hear that Shirley is doing okay. The chicken feed made wet with water in a taller container can be much easier for her to get food. The hen in the article I posted lived on scrambled egg sections between tube feeding and her finally taking chicken feed. Good luck with her.,