Hen Chronicles: Our Plymouth Rock, Snow, gets plugged up

Snow

Our “girls” have been producing fewer eggs lately. My guess is that it’s partly due to the excessive heat we’ve been having here in central Maine (at least by Maine standards). But when I let the hens out of their coop Monday morning, I knew the weather wasn’t our only problem.

As soon as the chickens race down into their pen at dawn, they make a beeline for their food bowls or, rarely, the water bowl. That’s just what Nala, Hope and Nellie did Monday morning. But Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, showed no interest in eating or drinking. She slowly walked around the pen as if in a daze, even lying down occasionally and half closing her eyes. And she wasn’t talking, an almost sure sign of trouble in a chicken because healthy hens chatter constantly and Snow is by far the noisiest hen in our quartet.

Liz and I immediately suspected that Snow might be “egg bound,” which Gail Damerow defines in The Chicken Encyclopedia as: “A condition in which an egg gets stuck just inside the vent,” the chicken’s rear end. This can be, Damerow warns ominously, “an extremely serious condition.” Other experts agree.

After we isolated Snow by putting her in a separate pen, we consulted Damerow on what to do next. Her instructions weren’t pleasant, because the stuck egg (if there was one) wasn't visible near the opening of the vent.

So we had to go foraging.

“If the egg is not visible,” Damerow writes, “lubricate a finger with K-Y Jelly or other water-based lubricant and gently insert it into the vent until you feel the hard shell with the end of your finger. Do not attempt to stretch the vent, which could tear delicate tissue.”

And to think chicken aficionados claim owning them is lots of fun!

While I held Snow aloft, Liz lubricated her finger and boldly inserted it where no finger had gone before. The good news was that Snow put up no protest. The bad news was that Liz could not feel an egg.

Still, we refused to give up on egg binding as a likely explanation for Snow’s lethargy, probably because we had no alternative diagnosis at hand.
 
Liz and I gave Snow a bath in a tub of warm, soapy water, hoping that would help get things moving internally. We then allowed her to “free range” in the yard for a bit while Liz followed her around, on the theory that exercise also might help to loosen things up.

Within minutes, Snow deposited an egg as she walked by the pen that held the other chickens. It wasn’t a very good egg as eggs go, because it was soft and the shell broke. But it was an egg nonetheless.

Sure enough, Snow was her old self almost immediately. She regained her appetite. Her energy level bounced back. And she started gabbing, to let us know that she wanted to rejoin the other hens. We left her in her own pen for a while, until she had more time to dry off from her bath. But a happy reunion occurred shortly thereafter.