- Apr 16, 2015
- 63
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Went out to feed our flock this morning and noticed one of our barred rocks "sleeping" (for lack of a better term) facing a corner of the coop. She did not rush to greet me when I approached with the food buckets like she usually does. She didn't move at all, in fact. She was fine when we fed them yesterday.
We removed her from the coop, isolated her and gave her fresh water (we haven't seen her drink any), fresh hay bedding, and some cricket treat (this is a new treat to our flock ... We only gave them their first "cricket party" or whatever the brand is called, over the weekend) which she hasn't eaten.
She has barely moved since we put her in isolation, except to do what my husband has called "ooching"... Kind of squirming and repositioning herself ever so slightly until she got herself right into the water dish. My husband moved her, but she keeps ending up with her wing in the water. The temps were in the mid 80s with low humidity yesterday and today so we didn't suspect overheating.
She's normally very feisty and does not like to be handled, but today, offered no resistance to being picked up and carried across the yard.
She's listless, her tail is drooping, her comb and wattle are slightly pale, and she keeps "clenching" her back end (flexing muscles in her rear end and lowering her tail even further). I'm reluctant to suspect egg binding, though, because she's our winter layer and tends not to lay in the warmer months so we already hadn't seen many eggs from her in the past few weeks.
The rest of the flock, including her coop-mate, all seem normal.
I'm trying to offer as much info as I can without being overly verbose. We're also interested in helping her, if possible, without spending hundreds of dollars at the vet.
A similar thing happened a few years ago to our other barred hen and we never did figure out what was wrong. That hen died. We haven't had any other issues until now.
Any suggestions?
We removed her from the coop, isolated her and gave her fresh water (we haven't seen her drink any), fresh hay bedding, and some cricket treat (this is a new treat to our flock ... We only gave them their first "cricket party" or whatever the brand is called, over the weekend) which she hasn't eaten.
She has barely moved since we put her in isolation, except to do what my husband has called "ooching"... Kind of squirming and repositioning herself ever so slightly until she got herself right into the water dish. My husband moved her, but she keeps ending up with her wing in the water. The temps were in the mid 80s with low humidity yesterday and today so we didn't suspect overheating.
She's normally very feisty and does not like to be handled, but today, offered no resistance to being picked up and carried across the yard.
She's listless, her tail is drooping, her comb and wattle are slightly pale, and she keeps "clenching" her back end (flexing muscles in her rear end and lowering her tail even further). I'm reluctant to suspect egg binding, though, because she's our winter layer and tends not to lay in the warmer months so we already hadn't seen many eggs from her in the past few weeks.
The rest of the flock, including her coop-mate, all seem normal.
I'm trying to offer as much info as I can without being overly verbose. We're also interested in helping her, if possible, without spending hundreds of dollars at the vet.
A similar thing happened a few years ago to our other barred hen and we never did figure out what was wrong. That hen died. We haven't had any other issues until now.
Any suggestions?