Nasty butt, nasty poop, and straining to lay ...

[AphroAt]

One of my birds went through her molt in late summer. She started laying again a couple of weeks ago and now she's...not good.

Symptoms:
* Straining to pass the egg, with a red, swollen protruding vent; the two times I've been able to observe this chicken in the nest box I can see one side of her vent literally bubbling out as she strains to pass the egg, and the tissue is brilliant red
* Each egg is covered with gloppy clear liquid (not eggwhite) and there are some urites stuck to the shell as well.
* The bird continues to leak from the vent for some time after she drops the egg. She doesn't leak constantly
* Occasionally she squats and blasts out some really nasty thin greenish-brown poop. The other chickens are all putting out nice tight urite-capped poops, color varies somewhat depending on what they've had to eat lately

Diet: Kitchen scraps - fruit/veg only, no meat or greasy scraps; bugs, no-soy/no-GMO layer ration, yogurt twice a week

I don't think this is vent gleet, but I've never seen it in person so I could be wrong. I'm wondering if the red swellling I have observed while the hen is trying to lay could be vent prolapse, or possibly an abcess in the vent?

The hen is active and out there making a living (ie, working for bugs) when I observe from the window. She's the first one to the feed tray, and I see her regularly at the watering station.

Any ideas what's going on here?

 

[Eggcessive]

I think you are dealing with a prolapse, and it seems she may have some damage from either the size of her eggs or perhaps having become egg bound in the past. I discovered two sister chickens with prolapses recently that come and go with having a loose vent. The treatment for a prolapse is to rub honey or Preparation H ointment inside and outside the vent, and gently push the pink tissue back inside then hold it there for 10 minutes. Stop her from laying for a week or two by placing her in a dark room, or by covering her cage. Reducing the amount of protein in her diet would also help with that, to give it time to heal. Each day, I would keep her vent clean, even giving her vent area an epsom salt warm soak, then re-applying the honey or Prep H. Here is a link to read: http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2012/04/prolapse-vent-causes-treatment-graphic.html

 

[AphroAt]

Well, go figure. I caught the same chicken on the nest box this morning, she popped that egg out in a very businesslike no-muss, no-fuss fashion. No straining, no messy leaking, no weird red produding membranes. The egg was just a bit wetter than I expect a dropped-this-instant egg to be but lacked the stuck-on urites I've seen on the last few eggs she's dropped. Maybe she just needed to get back in the swing of laying regularly after her molt, and maybe I panicked too soon

I am dosing all the birds with metronidazol for 7 days starting today, since this same chicken did promptly hop off the box and blast out more nasty diarrhea, and I'm upping their yogurt to 4x weekly for a while. I have a lab tech friend who can do a microscope check of some poop if the anti-microbial doesn't offer any improvement