Sudden change in behavior

[Thorn_shrike]

I have an isa brown who lays nearly every day, her eggs are quite often a little weird though. Some are so thin that they crack almost as soon as she lays them, some are completely normal, some have a rough bumpy texture, sometimes the color isn’t evenly distributed on the egg (like the top 1/4 will be super light and the rest of the egg gradually deepens, or they will look like one side of each end have been dipped in brown dye but the rest is light). She often has blood spots in her eggs too.

When I got her she was over a year old already but I’m not sure by how much. That would make her at least a year and a half.

The past couple days have been weird though. Yesterday she laid a seemingly perfect pinky brown egg down in the run. She’s never laid outside of the coop, not even in a different nesting box. This morning there was a normal looking brown egg in the box.

Just now she very stiffly walked over to me in the yard and stood about a foot away and started straining, eventually laying an egg with no shell at all. She’s not unfriendly but we aren’t best buds. Shes not attached to me at all, but she very purposefully walked all the way over to me and stared at me during all this. She then walked to another spot next to me in the shade and laid down and started falling asleep. This is VERY not like her. When she’s out she’s almost constantly foraging and running around. She’s still laying here and sitting weird. What could be going on? This came out of nowhere, up until she walked over she was acting normal.

 

[azygous]

Being a production breed, she's likely begun to have glitches in her reproductive system. When I see a hen of mine begin with eggs with shell quality issues and behavior turn problematic, I start her on a daily calcium citrate tablet to try to increase her blood calcium and also to calibrate her cycle.

Let's hope it's simple and can be remedied. However, if she's developing cancer tumors in the oviduct or if there's a virus starting to create mischief, we can't know that. If a week on daily calcium therapy works, you will see her go back to a single egg per day and improved shell quality. If not, she will get gradually worse. Then you'll assume it's cancer.

This is the kind of calcium to buy.