“Get some chickens,” owners always say. “They’re easy to take care of,” they insist. “It will be fun!”
We did get some chickens, back in 2012. Three hens. And we’ve had hens ever since; the original trio, then only two chickens, followed later by four, then three, and now two again. Sure enough, they have been easy to care for. Except when they aren’t. And, yes, it has been fun. Except when it isn’t.
Liz and I love Nellie and Hope, who are Rhode Island Reds. Hatched in January 2013, "the girls" arrived together, by mail, in May of that year, having been shipped to Augusta, Maine, by a hatchery in Iowa.
Usually, from day to day and week to week, Nellie and Hope pose no major challenges. But minor problems do present themselves, and with some regularity.
Let’s start with Saturday night. At dusk, when I went out to lock the hens in their coop for the night, Hope was perched on the roost, as expected. But Nellie, who should have been up there as well, was bouncing around on the floor of the coop, desperately trying to get to the roost but unable to do so.
This has happened before. Our theory is that, for whatever reason, Nellie sometimes waits too long to head for the roost, and by then, it's too dark to make the jump. (Chickens are eagle-eyed in the light but they have lousy nighttime vision.) Anyway, we knew the drill. I lifted the coop’s hinged roof and Liz held Nellie over the roost while she lowered her "landing gear."
At dawn on Sunday, Liz and I removed Hope from the coop for her weekly trim, in 10-degree weather. Hope has a spur jutting from the back of her left leg, like you’d find on a rooster but less frequently on a hen. The long spur curves back toward the leg and is constantly growing in length, so we trim the tip of it with a file every Sunday, to keep it blunt and under control. While I held Hope, who is quite calm during this procedure, Liz took aim at the spur with a nail file.
That job done, a surprise presented itself. “The girls” holed themselves up in the coop, instead of racing out to the pen for their breakfast, as they normally do first thing in the morning. Nellie was parked in the nest box (where she eventually laid an egg). And Hope, who never emerges first from the coop, decided to stay put inside until Nellie led the way out into the pen. Once the hens finally "left the building," I was able to clean the now-empty coop.
We did get some chickens, back in 2012. Three hens. And we’ve had hens ever since; the original trio, then only two chickens, followed later by four, then three, and now two again. Sure enough, they have been easy to care for. Except when they aren’t. And, yes, it has been fun. Except when it isn’t.
Liz and I love Nellie and Hope, who are Rhode Island Reds. Hatched in January 2013, "the girls" arrived together, by mail, in May of that year, having been shipped to Augusta, Maine, by a hatchery in Iowa.
Usually, from day to day and week to week, Nellie and Hope pose no major challenges. But minor problems do present themselves, and with some regularity.
Let’s start with Saturday night. At dusk, when I went out to lock the hens in their coop for the night, Hope was perched on the roost, as expected. But Nellie, who should have been up there as well, was bouncing around on the floor of the coop, desperately trying to get to the roost but unable to do so.
This has happened before. Our theory is that, for whatever reason, Nellie sometimes waits too long to head for the roost, and by then, it's too dark to make the jump. (Chickens are eagle-eyed in the light but they have lousy nighttime vision.) Anyway, we knew the drill. I lifted the coop’s hinged roof and Liz held Nellie over the roost while she lowered her "landing gear."
At dawn on Sunday, Liz and I removed Hope from the coop for her weekly trim, in 10-degree weather. Hope has a spur jutting from the back of her left leg, like you’d find on a rooster but less frequently on a hen. The long spur curves back toward the leg and is constantly growing in length, so we trim the tip of it with a file every Sunday, to keep it blunt and under control. While I held Hope, who is quite calm during this procedure, Liz took aim at the spur with a nail file.
That job done, a surprise presented itself. “The girls” holed themselves up in the coop, instead of racing out to the pen for their breakfast, as they normally do first thing in the morning. Nellie was parked in the nest box (where she eventually laid an egg). And Hope, who never emerges first from the coop, decided to stay put inside until Nellie led the way out into the pen. Once the hens finally "left the building," I was able to clean the now-empty coop.
That’s when I discovered the blood. Bright red drops were scattered over the pine bedding on the coop’s floor. There wasn't a lot of blood, but blood is blood. Obviously, something was wrong.
Who was injured? Where? And why? At first, we figured Liz might have nicked Hope’s leg while filing the spur, but when I held Hope so Liz could examine her, what she saw initially made no sense at all. Hope was, in fact, the injured hen, but Liz found blood on her right foot. The spur is on the other leg.
Upon closer inspection, it turned out Hope had broken a toenail on her right foot. Hence the blood. The bleeding seemed to have stopped by then, but Liz liberally applied cornstarch, a clotting agent, just to play it safe.
“Get some chickens,” owners always say. “They’re easy to take care of,” they insist. “It will be fun!”
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