Weird Oviduct Omelet

[eatmorechicken]

I picked up a hen from somebody in the community two weeks ago, and it seemed to be healthy with a normal weight. I didn't look at it too closely. I noticed last week it was droopy and wasn't eating very much. The hen was two years old, and the lady that I got her from said that she was "showing her age". so the hen probably was showing symptoms before I got her. I killed the hen because I feared I may introduce a pathogen to my flock. I opened her up and found that she had no meat...she was literally bones. There was some fat storage in the usual places. the keel bone was misshapen--deformed. I pulled the breast back and found that the organs were normal color and size. However, the oviduct had a huge soft mass in it. I thought maybe it was a tumor, but when I opened the oviduct I found an omelet. It looked like a collection of yolks constipated the oviduct and cooked and was about 3 inches in diameter. There was a half formed shell in it and a bean looking thing. No pictures... sorry. What might have caused this? Has anyone else experienced it?

 

[EweSheep]

She may have been one of those darned internal layers. Sorry that she had to go but you did the right thing!

 

[speckledhen]

She was an internal layer, sounds like. Have opened up plenty of those in my chicken keeping career, sadly. Have one dying of it right now and a second one in the mid stages of it.

This thread may be helpful to you. https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=362422

 

[CMV]

An internal layer. Poor girl. You probably did her a good turn by culling her. I just recently culled and processed some birds for my neighbor and discovered a young bird in the earliest stages of internal laying. It made my neighbor feel slightly better about her decision to cull these birds knowing the torture this poor bird was going to be going through if she had been allowed to continue.

Sorry for your loss.

 

[eatmorechicken]

I did some research and found that internal laying is when the egg deposits in the abdomen and egg binding is when the egg gets stuck in the oviduct for any reason. I found this qoute off the poultry site

Eggbinding is always a touch-and-go situation and it can go from relatively benign to life-threatening within a very short time. The fact that your hen was still eating and drinking indicates that she wasn't in a lot of discomfort, but it sounds like she would have been very soon, so your decision to have her put to sleep was the best one. There are a myriad of reasons for eggbinding - it's hard to tell what caused your hen's problem. Sometimes the hen is a touch dehydrated (from playing outside and forgetting to drink or whatever reason...) and her mucous membranes dry out a bit, not allowing the egg to pass as easily through the oviduct and cloaca. Sometimes the egg gets stuck on a shell gland and won't move out of the uterus, causing other eggs to get piled up behind it. Reverse peristalsis can wreak havoc if an egg gets stuck, as it will start to push the egg backwards in the oviduct, sometimes pushing the eggs right back out and into the abdominal cavity (one reason for EYP). And the list of reasons goes on and on...

Thanks for the replies! This is new to me. I'm sure I had it in my flock before, but I didn't start investigating problems untill recently.​

 

[speckledhen]

Whole eggs with shells rarely deposit in the abdomen. It's usually masses of solid infection mixed with egg yolks. And those masses can also gunk up the oviducts as well, and look like link sausages in casings. I've only had a couple of egg bound hens and fixed one, one died since the egg was so huge and had another egg inside it, that it perforated the oviduct and dropped into the abdomen. The rest were internal layers.