GottaHatchAPlan
Chirping
So today my australorp hen pooped this out:
Yesterday she was fine but now my Peggy is slow, quiet (she didn't even call to be let out/fed this morning!) and didn't want to leave the laying box. She had been straining all morning in the box and had barely eaten. We've coaxed her out of the laying box to peck around the yard but she kept moving so slowly and while I've gotten her to eat now, she acted hesitant to do so (up until yesterday she used to climb onto my lap and leap to get food, so this is a far departure from her typical behaviour).
We tried massaging her belly and couldn't find anything, and after checking her droppings (which are a little watery and some was leaking out of the vent and down her leg) we found these things. I have no clue what they are; mum thinks they're the remains of an undeveloped egg and gramps thinks they might be the remains of something she's eaten, but I'm not convinced of either. The thing on the right feels a bit like thick, tough egg membrane, but it seems like the wrong shape to be an egg. The thing on the left is very soft and fleshy, like chicken meat.
Peggy is about 7 months and just started laying. After laying well for about a week she suddenly stopped for a few days. Now this. There are no signs of blood near the vent and her wattle and comb are red and healthy looking. The only out-of-place thing I can think of leading up to this is that her droppings over the last few days were unusually large.
She's acting closer to normal now, eating, pecking and scratching around the yard, but I'm still worried.
UPDATE:
Peggy went back to acting more or less normal but I was still on the lookout for odd behaviour. I wondered if her poops were normal (they are, and are back to her normal smallish size) and while searching for poops I noticed something by the rose bush.It was a meat sack.
With a fully formed egg inside.
The egg sack was white and seemed to be made out of the same material as the egg-membrane thing on the right in the pictures above (the thing on the left remains a worrisome mystery). Inside it was filled with what seemed like raw egg whites surrounding a fully formed egg. Hardshelled and all. She didn't seem at all concerned about the egg and definitely hadn't announced her laying like she usually does. It wasn't even hidden away, just left on the ground next to a brick. I don't have any pictures of the intact sack, but I googled what I could and it looked like this:
The reason why I don't have my own pictures is that I made the mistake of leaving it on the ground in the driveway while I grabbed my camera. By the time I came back, Peggy was EATING IT. She was hell-bent on finishing it, too. Like I had to bodily wrestle her away from it and hold her back while she fought to get at it. I ended up having to pick her up and lock her in her coop to take the pictures of what was left, and even then she was trying to get back out to it.
Here is what I got:
The stuff leaking out is the fluid from the sack, not the egg.After that, I decided to separate the egg and the sack and see what it was she wanted. She went straight for the sack, finished it, and then tried to eat the egg as well. She managed to make a small hole in the shell before I took it away:
(this is the first time she's ever eaten her own eggs, btw. We tried feeding her crushed shells a few weeks ago but she didn't seem interested and we hadn't tried since. We've never given her actual eggs, not even scrambled).
We inspected the egg inside and discovered 3 things:
- It was larger than any egg she'd laid before, now the size of normal chicken eggs we get from the store. Prior to this, they were all a little on the small side.
- The shell was weaker than normal. Still hard, but more brittle than most eggshells.
- The yolk wasn't normal; it was one big pale-ish blob with a few small blobs branching off the sides:
Last edited:
