I just had a seemingly perfectly healthy leghorn die........

[cjatthefarm]

Baked potatoes are not dangerous, so you did nothing wrong. You just don't want to feed raw potato peels as they are very hard to digest and the sprouts off them can be poisonous.

Leghorns are high production birds. Sometimes they develop a reproductive infection called Egg Yolk Peritonitis, which can kill quickly without external symptoms, or go on and on, with bloated abdomen and weight loss.

I'm not saying that's what your hen died of, especially if she was laying at the time, but chickens die of all sorts of things we cannot diagnose from the outside, like heart defects.


The first chicken death here was a Wyandotte. The only clue was the day before, she was sitting in the shade, not the bright sun, on a cold day. I picked her up and looked her over, and she looked fine. Then, we found her dead. We opened her up and found her abdomen full of loose egg yolk, so that was the first death from egg yolk peritonitis here. Since then, there have been many others, unfortunately, a hazard of owning the most common hatchery stock it seems. My breeder quality types never have this, at least they haven't so far, for some reason.

Thank you speckledhen for this information. I would like to think the food had nothing to do with this hen's death. This helps.

 

[sharol]

I lost a GLW that way. She was fine, then she was dead. Except for being dead, she looked perfectly healthy. I should have done a necropsy, but I just couldn't bring myself to cut into her. I looked for reasons, and after several people answered my questions, I chalked it off to heart or reproductive problems. She was a good layer -- 5-6 eggs a week (they were pink). Sigh.

Sharol

 

[walfarmchiks]

We regularly feed our chickens the pulp from our Breville juicer. I know, I could use it to make carrot cake, celery, chard, etc.etc, but the chickens seem to really go for it. We do not feed them raw potato peelings, but mostly because when we tried, they simply ignored them. They also don't do well with artichoke leaves (that have been cooked and shaved (by my hungry teeth!), or green, red or yellow peppers, plus a few others. Let's see.... thimk thimk... raw beet skins, nope. Bananas, neither skins nor fruit. WE do feed them the outer shells of all melons, which they really go for, reducing them to just the hard outer skin. Slightly overripe cantelopes? I think they war over those! "Mine ! Mine!" [

remember the squabbling seagulls in Disney's Little Mermaid? "Mine Mine!" Cute.] Oh yeah: no cucumber skins. Again, it's just that they seem to know, and don't bother to eat them. I do know that they love to dig out most of my wife's hard-work gardening efforts, incl. most any vegetable sprouts, plus flowers and anything else. P"Ouch!

Well, best of luck.