Have you ever wondered why the wild turkey brooding season is so short? They could easily lay into the early summer and have better temperature and enough time to rear their brood before cool autumn rolls back around. Sadly, my Narragansett hens have taught me a valuable lesson about late season brooding. I hope the account below prevents someone else from such a tragedy.
2013 has been a bumper year for our Narragansett flock. Six laying hens have produced over 200 poults thus far providing enough funds for us to significantly expand both our poultry and hog barns. Our hens are 80/20 free range/coop and they all detest nest boxes. They'd rather find their own spots in the fence lines and brush. It's fine, I just have to go find new nests each week. I struggled to find eggs for about a week at the end of May and then four hens just disappeared. No feathers, no carcass, no smell, so I assumed they had fooled me and were brooding a nest. Sure enough, over the next two weeks I stumbled on two of the four sitting on eggs. Last week one of the hens showed up and she looked rough. I was finally about to catch her in the evening and she had a large open wound on the base of her tail that was infested with maggots. They had eaten into her colon and I had to put her down that night.
From the looks of the wound, I thought she had been attacked by a dog or coyote and run off her nest. This morning, one of the others was standing in the front yard. I quickly checked the nests and found hers with nine eggs inside. One of the poults had its head out of the shell, another had its beak through, and five more had just pipped. I gathered the eggs because the smell of blood would bring dogs and vermin quickly. As I picked up the egg with the poult's head out, maggots began to fall out in bunches. In that short time flies and already infested and maggots had eaten through the chest wall and into the abdomen. More flies came out of the hole where the second poults beak had protruded. These flies were about twice the size of a gnat and much smaller than a house fly. When I broke the shell open, the poult's body was already covered in tiny worms. None of the seven poults survived hatching.
I went out to the poultry barn to check water drinkers and I saw the hen covered in flies. I caught her and examined her tail; it was the same as the first hen. It wasn't a coyote or dog that had attacked the hens, just flies. So far I have doused her tail with a water hose to clean off the maggots then soaked her in peroxide and covered her tail with triple antibiotic ointment. Her vent looks ok, there weren't any worms or broken skin. I've given her a double dose of penicillin and she's now isolated on clean bedding.
I'm still not very hopeful and expect that the other two hens will meet a similar demise. I deeply regret that it has cost me at least one, maybe four, ready good hens to learn a lesson that nature had already figured out.
2013 has been a bumper year for our Narragansett flock. Six laying hens have produced over 200 poults thus far providing enough funds for us to significantly expand both our poultry and hog barns. Our hens are 80/20 free range/coop and they all detest nest boxes. They'd rather find their own spots in the fence lines and brush. It's fine, I just have to go find new nests each week. I struggled to find eggs for about a week at the end of May and then four hens just disappeared. No feathers, no carcass, no smell, so I assumed they had fooled me and were brooding a nest. Sure enough, over the next two weeks I stumbled on two of the four sitting on eggs. Last week one of the hens showed up and she looked rough. I was finally about to catch her in the evening and she had a large open wound on the base of her tail that was infested with maggots. They had eaten into her colon and I had to put her down that night.
From the looks of the wound, I thought she had been attacked by a dog or coyote and run off her nest. This morning, one of the others was standing in the front yard. I quickly checked the nests and found hers with nine eggs inside. One of the poults had its head out of the shell, another had its beak through, and five more had just pipped. I gathered the eggs because the smell of blood would bring dogs and vermin quickly. As I picked up the egg with the poult's head out, maggots began to fall out in bunches. In that short time flies and already infested and maggots had eaten through the chest wall and into the abdomen. More flies came out of the hole where the second poults beak had protruded. These flies were about twice the size of a gnat and much smaller than a house fly. When I broke the shell open, the poult's body was already covered in tiny worms. None of the seven poults survived hatching.
I went out to the poultry barn to check water drinkers and I saw the hen covered in flies. I caught her and examined her tail; it was the same as the first hen. It wasn't a coyote or dog that had attacked the hens, just flies. So far I have doused her tail with a water hose to clean off the maggots then soaked her in peroxide and covered her tail with triple antibiotic ointment. Her vent looks ok, there weren't any worms or broken skin. I've given her a double dose of penicillin and she's now isolated on clean bedding.
I'm still not very hopeful and expect that the other two hens will meet a similar demise. I deeply regret that it has cost me at least one, maybe four, ready good hens to learn a lesson that nature had already figured out.
