So sorry about your chick!I got home at 5:30 pm and immediately checked on the nest. It REALLY did stink in the room, and not broody poo smell. Something was rotting!! I checked under Hettie's wing and both "Sweetie's and Hettie's chicks" look fine -- standing, cheeping, responding to me petting them, totally normal. I felt under Hettie and found an unhatched egg that had an opening in it and was a little wet -- MoneyPenny's egg was in the middle of hatching, I thought, and about 29 hours early. How wonderful and exciting -- everything was going so well.
But WHAT was that smell??!!! It was horrible, and strong enough to be a bit overpowering! Had a mouse or rat gotten in and died??
I looked around the room a bit but couldn't localize it -- it seemed to be coming from everywhere. Eventually I gave up and decided to go get something for dinner. I walked into the kitchen and my husband recoiled a bit and said that I brought the smell with me. I told him I'd go change clothes, assuming the smell had gotten into material. When I came back into the kitchen he said that the smell was just as bad, so the smell had to be on me. That was impossible -- I hadn't really touched anything except the nest. I put my hand up to my nose and the smell up close was horrendous!! It had to have come from the moisture on the egg. "MoneyPenny's egg" must be rotting.
I went back to the nest and reached under Hettie and removed the egg. OMG it stunk!!! There was brown fluid leaking out of the hole that the chick had pipped, and there were lines of shell cracking and membrane bulging in multiple areas. The only reason it hadn't exploded under the hen was because the pip hole was releasing some of
the pressure. I put it on a towel, washed my hands several times, alternating between handsoap and lemon juice (to remove the smell), then put on gloves and took the egg outside for an eggtopsy. The chick was fully developed, the yolk sac was completely resorbed, and there were 2 malpositions. One was that the beak was over the right wing, which is the most common malposition. It may make it harder to hatch, but most still do hatch eventually. The second malposition, which is the second most common, was that one of the feet was extended up, trapped between the skull and the shell, instead of flexed down around the belly. That makes it difficult to pip because the chick doesn't have enough room for the back thrusts. If it is able to pip fully, which this chick did, its legs are not in the right position to rotate it around for the zip, or to push out of the shell. So this chick died because it couldn't escape the shell, and then started rotting. I was amazed that it had happened so quickly, as MoneyPenny's egg hadn't even pipped when I had last seen it less than 48 hours ago. Then I looked at the markings on the shell. It was Sweetie Pie's egg!!!
We don't have a run attached to the coop. Our girls free range when they are not in the coop for the night. I was thinking that it might work to have something that they could go out into, but definitely need them to be safe at night. I might be able to fence off a small portion under the coop, as it is raised about 2 feet off the ground and the adults tend to hang out under there during bad weather. The only hard part is getting the broody hen and chick down there for the day. I possibly could just grab them both and put them in when I open the coop in the morning, but would this really work? I want the chick to start integrating into the main flock, and I also want it to know to go back in the coop at night.Hi! I am a total newbie in backyard chicken behavior, but I had a set up that resembled yours. Maybe I could help by telling you what I did. I had a dog carrier inside the tiny run of my tiny coop with the hen and her 4 chicks. Of course, they grew a little bigger, so I decided to do a makeshift run for them. I had a dog exercise pen laying around (no pun intended, so I covered it in hardware cloth to keep the chicks from going through. I then placed the dog carrier inside the pen and covered it with plastic vegetable garden fence (the size is between hardware cloth and chicken wire, but cheaper). If you shape the exercise pen into a rectangle, you'll be able to make it look like a run with a gate entrance on the smaller side. I closed mine with wire ties, so I can remove them as needed if I have to get in. They have shelter at night and room to run during the day. I hope this helps. Good luck!
the exercise pen in not attached to the coop, but in plain sight of the flock, so they can see my chicks. My hen and her chicks go inside the dog carrier when the weather gets bad, because the carrier is inside the exercise pen.
