Yikes - Hair wrapped around tongue!

[SanDogDewey]

My wife went out to check on the chicks last night before we went to bed. One of them had gotten a piece of her hair, that had fallen in the coop, wrapped around its tongue. The other chicks thought it was something to eat and were tugging on it, making it tighter. She came and got me and I armed myself with a flashlight, magnifying headlamp and a pair of tweezers. While she held the poor chirping chick still, I managed to untie the hair from its tongue. She was a little wobbly when we first put her down, so I picked her back up and cupped her in my hands till she recovered a bit. Doesn't appear to be any damage as she was eating and drinking normally within a few minutes. Whew, tragedy avoided!

Just a reminder to keep your coop free of strings and threads....oh and long hair!

 

[the poppster]

That was a close one! Good thing you were there to help. You have to watch out for strings....from feed sacks and such things...I usually watch for bits of junk like that when I feed and water the birds. Plastic plant tags are a bad one, they are too big for them to eat when they are new...but if the tags age for a while, they get brittle and will break into little bits...tempting little white plastic bits! Not good. Another thing to be careful with is green grapes. I had a bunch in the fridge that needed to be tossed or eaten, so I decided to treat the half grown chicks...I threw a few to them, thinking that they would peck them apart....one greedy little bugger gulped one of the grapes down whole! Unfortunately it didn't go all the way down....and he couldn't cough it up either...he was staggering around the pen gasping for breath...I caught him, turned him upside down and gently massaged the grape back up his throat...he survived. So no more whole grapes for my birds...I squish them before feeding them to the birds. Don't want to be doing a bird version of the Heimlich maneuver again.

 

[SanDogDewey]

Note to self - No whole grapes!