After I released and fed “the girls” one morning last week, I propped open the hinged roof on the coop so I could remove the previous night’s “offerings.”
That’s when I noticed the blood.
There’s a thick layer of pine shavings on the coop’s floor. As I scooped poop from the bedding, I found a few shavings that looked like they had been dabbed with bright red paint.
The blood was dry, and there wasn’t much of it — just a few drops here and there. Snow, Nellie and Hope were out in the pen by then, so I immediately examined them. The hens were behaving normally, and none of them appeared to be injured. Yet obviously one of them had had a mishap.
My only prior experience with a bleeding hen occurred in 2014, when I found Snow in the coop with her head and neck covered in blood. She had somehow managed to slice off part of her comb — that red appendage atop a chicken’s head. Although Snow recovered, it was a damn scary thing to discover her white feathers dyed red.
Last week’s incident was far less dramatic. The mysterious injury was minor. There was so little blood in the coop that it might have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t been rummaging around in search of poop. In the days that followed, I found no fresh blood, no visible wounds and no abnormal behavior.
We never did figure out who had been injured and we still don’t know what happened. But Liz and I have developed a plausible (albeit unproven) theory that may offer an explanation.
The hens — Nellie, in particular — often perch on the edge of the water bowl. Inevitably, a wayward foot occasionally slips into the water. We had a spell of bitterly cold weather last week, and although I replaced the hens’ drinking water several times on the most frigid days, the bowl sometimes began to ice up before I removed it. Perhaps one of the chickens nicked a toe on the jagged ice, or suffered a tiny facial cut while drinking from a partially frozen bowl.
We’ll never know, but this much is clear: The world can be a dangerous place, even when your tiny corner of it is no bigger than a small chicken coop.
I have thirty chickens and occasionaly one of the eggs is covered in blood.I really don't know why but I chalk it up to difficulty with the laying. Kind of like a backward baby....it never seems to be an injury and the hens don't seem to suffer
ReplyDeleteHmmm. I've never seen that.
ReplyDelete