Hen Chronicles: Enjoying their companionship, while it lasts

Keeping chickens brings its share of aggravation and heartache, perhaps even more if it involves a small flock whose members you treat as pets.

Since my wife Liz and I first acquired hens back in 2012, we have lost two chickens to disease and a third to problems stemming from age. That last death was especially difficult because it involved Snow, a boisterous Plymouth Rock who oozed personality. When I brought her to the vet to be euthanized two years ago, I held her in my arms as Snow — once so bossy and exuberant — quietly slipped away.

We have only two hens now: Nellie and Hope, Rhode Island Reds who hatched in January 2013. They, too, have seen their share of problems lately.

Hope has had a growth in her chest for several months. A veterinarian who examined her in May suspected it might be a tumor that is likely to claim her life before this coming winter is done and gone. And now we’re combating an infestation of mites that probably were introduced to ”the girls” by wild birds or other critters making their rounds in the backyard, where our coop and pen are located. We seem to be winning that battle, though.

Maybe it’s because of such problems, not despite them, that I enjoy dealing with the hens as much as I do. Nellie and Hope still love life. They’re still up to the challenge. By the time I get out to the coop at dawn, they’re at the large window on the east side, anxiously waiting for me to release them into the pen.

Both hens eagerly dig into their breakfast. Later in the day, they dance in anticipation when they see me approaching with mealworms or dandelion greens or kale or berries. Nellie has been laying eggs regularly again this year, which is somewhat unusual for a hen her age.

Whether by choice or infirmity,”the girls” don’t hop up to the roost to sleep anymore, but snuggle together in a nest box that’s really only big enough for one hen, yet somehow accommodates two. The lives of animals, like the lives of humans, are fragile, troubled and transitory. So we savor their presence, while we can.

Hen Chronicles: Hot town, summer in the city . . . .

We don’t tend to get dangerously hot summer weather here in northern New England. Ninety degrees is “wicked hot” by our standards; when the temperature rises higher than that, we really take notice.

So when temps here in central Maine hit 95 degrees one day last weekend, with a heat index of 101, I got nervous. Not about myself, but about “the girls,” Nellie and Hope, our six-year-old Rhode Island Reds. Six isn’t exactly elderly for hens, but our duo aren’t spring chickens anymore either.

I learned years ago that keeping chickens cool in the summer can be more difficult than keeping them warm in the winter. Within reasonable limits, they do a pretty good job of coping with the cold, what with all those feathers, but they have a tougher time dealing with the heat.

Thanks to some tall vegetation east of the hens' pen, it remained shaded until late morning on July 20, the day in question. At that point, I raised an old patio umbrella over the pen, to shield it from the midday sun. As the day wore on and the temperature soared ever higher, Nellie seemed to be fine, but Hope began to show signs of discomfort, and possible distress. She panted, as overheated chickens do, and hid under the raised coop. Eventually, she all but stopped moving around, for extended periods of time. I wouldn’t say she was listless, but it was quite clear she was having a very bad day.

My wife Liz and I considered moving the hens into a small backup coop that we keep in the somewhat cooler garage as a sort of intensive care unit when a hen is sick or injured and needs to be isolated. But we decided that relocation might just exacerbate Hope’s problems, by creating more anxiety.

Instead, I tried various cooling tricks, such as hosing down the pen several times, and misting the hens with a spray bottle. I placed ice in their water bowl, covered portions of the pen with plywood, emptied a large bag of ice cubes in the pen, and gave the hens chunks of watermelon (which they like), to help keep them hydrated.

As 6 p.m. rolled around, Hope remained stationary and visibly uncomfortable, and we again considered moving the hens into the garage. But suddenly, almost as if someone had flipped a switch, Hope bounced back. Her behavior returned to normal and the crisis, if that’s what it was, passed. The weather has been more seasonable since then, and she has not shown renewed signs of stress from the heat.

But what of the future? As climate change worsens and our weather becomes ever more extreme and erratic, the human race won’t be the only affected species. We'd have to be blind not to realize that the denizens of the animal kingdom, including our pets and livestock, will suffer as well.

Hen Chronicles: Coping with challenges

During our seven years of keeping chickens, I’ve found it to be a rewarding and entertaining hobby, thanks to the beauty, intelligence and quirks of our feathered pets. (Plus the fresh eggs, of course.) But life becomes a bit more complicated when things go wrong.

More than a month ago, one of our two Rhode Island Reds — Hope — developed a deformity. Her chest expanded, becoming more pronounced than normal. I took her to a veterinarian who not only treats chickens but has some of her own.

As is often the case when chickens take ill, there was no simple, obvious explanation for Hope’s condition. The vet speculated that Hope might have an obstruction because of something she ate, or she might have a tumor, which could be either benign or cancerous. We returned home with instructions to change Hope’s diet for several weeks, to see if that made any difference. But the long-term prognosis was not encouraging. Hope and Nellie are both more than six years old, which the vet described as the upper end of middle age. She stated matter of factly that, even if Hope survives her current dilemma, she probably won’t make it through another winter.

So, for the past month we’ve been keeping a close eye on Hope. The obstruction or growth or whatever it is hasn’t shrunk, but neither has it grown any larger. Perhaps more importantly, Hope still has a good quality of life. She has a voracious appetite and gets around perfectly well. She is alert and bright-eyed and interested in her surroundings.

I suppose Hope could die tomorrow. Or she may deteriorate so badly that she has to be euthanized. Yet I feel relief, even a momentary burst of joy, when I go out to the coop at dawn and watch her flap her wings as she heads down the ramp from the coop to the pen. Instead of obsessing over what the future may bring, I’m grateful for the sight that greeted me this morning: a ravenous Hope taking a quick break from her breakfast to lift her head and stare at me for a moment, her beak slathered with mash.

Hen Chronicles: Another chicken-keeping first under our belts

Keeping chickens encourages self-reliance, at least to a degree. My wife Liz and I have learned how to deal with various problems since we got started in 2012, including bloody accidents. But we reached another milestone today when Hope, one of our two Rhode Island Reds, needed to have her beak trimmed.

One of the many things about which I was blissfully ignorant when we first acquired hens is that, sometimes, part of a chicken’s beak will start growing, and continue to do so until it gets so long that it threatens the bird’s ability to peck and eat. Some time ago, the upper portion of Hope’s beak began to get longer. At first, it struck me as a harmless oddity. But over time, it got longer and longer, eventually reaching a point at which it began to curve downward.  A bit of research revealed that this is not all that unusual. Intervention was recommended, while Hope was still able to eat normally.

We could have tried trimming the beak with a nail file, but Hope’s condition seemed to call for something more. Digging out the clippers that we occasionally use to trim the hens’ nails, Liz and I headed out to the coop first thing this morning to set things right. I’d watched an online video of what looked like a stressed and agitated chicken getting a beak trim, so I feared the worst. But we couldn’t see making a 17-mile drive to the vet’s office for what the experts describe as a simple procedure. The key is not to cut far enough into the beak to cause injury, pain and bleeding.

I removed Hope from the coop and held her securely. Liz took hold of Hope’s head to keep it stable, raised the clippers to Hope’s beak, took aim, and snipped the tip. Much to my surprise, Hope did not flinch or squirm or squawk or show any distress. In fact, she didn't even close her eyes. She sat quietly in my arms before and during the procedure. As soon as I put her back in the coop, she ran out into the pen and dug into her breakfast.

Liz and I both came away with the impression that Hope seemed to appreciate the trim, as if she somehow understood it was being done for her benefit. But that can’t be true. Comprehension and gratitude from a hen? Impossible! After all, as dismissive people like to say about poultry, “they’re only chickens.”

Hen Chronicles: Yes, even chickens are sentient creatures

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines sentient as responsive to or conscious of sense impressions; aware; finely sensitive in perception or feeling.

The first definition — recognizing information provided by the senses — obviously applies to chickens as well as to other species, including our own. So too the second definition. Chickens have excellent eyesight, for example, and they respond to the voices of people they know.

But does that third definition fit? Are chickens “finely sensitive in perception or feeling”?

Last week, Nellie, one of our two Rhode Island Red hens, was under the weather. She was lethargic on Monday and her appetite was off. The same was true the next day, and her behavior was sufficiently worrisome that I called a veterinarian to have Nellie checked out.

As it happened, the vet, whom we had consulted about our chickens in the past, could not see Nellie until Friday, so I made arrangements to bring her in then. By Wednesday, though, Nellie had improved, and she continued to do so on Thursday. I canceled the appointment, and am glad to report that, as of this morning, Nellie is behaving normally.

So what does all this have to do with the sentience of chickens? Here’s the thing. While she was unwell, Nellie spent quite a bit of time sitting around, in the coop or outside, in the pen. She moved from time to time, only to plant herself in a different spot. And through it all, whenever I went out to check on the patient, Hope, the other Rhode Island Red, was right by her side. Wherever Nellie chose to sit, Hope stayed with her, sentinel-like, always standing as close to the seated Nellie as she could get. Hope clearly saw that Nellie was behaving abnormally, and that fact concerned her.

So although I don’t claim to know if chickens are “finely sensitive,” clearly they are “sensitive in perception or feeling” to some degree and in some fashion. More so, I dare say, than many humans.

Hen Chronicles: Surviving a brutal heat wave

The experts say it’s more important to keep chickens cool during the summer than warm during the winter, because they can cope with the cold far better than with the heat.

I’ve found this to be true over the years. Feathers are a great asset in the winter, but quite the opposite during a heat wave. "The girls" obviously are more content when the thermometer drops to 5 degrees than when it spikes to 95. 

So this has not been a great week for our two Rhode Island Reds, Nellie and Hope. For days on end, the temperature hovered in the 70-degree range at dawn, and topped 90 within hours, even reaching 97 degrees on one especially brutal day.

The hens survived the ordeal, but not comfortably. They panted, as chickens do when they’re warm. They ate less than usual. They did not move around a lot, spending much of their time in the shade under the elevated coop.

I did what I could to help them, by covering portions of the pen with plywood to block the sun, and by adding ice cubes to their drinking water. I even placed frozen bottles of water in our small coop before the hens went to bed, to help cool it down a bit.

By last night, everything had changed. It was breezy and cool at dusk, which is chicken bed time, and for the first time in close to a week "the girls" appeared to be happy on their roost. Today dawned at 54 degrees, with a projected high in the 70s, and the hens raced out into their pen this morning. Chickens can’t smile, of course, but if they could, they would.

Hen Chronicles: Is there a chicken doctor in the house?

The popularity of backyard chickens is said to be on the rise, and if the proliferation of books, specialized magazines, online poultry resources and newspaper stories is any measure, that would seem to be true.

Yet one thing I’ve learned in six years of keeping chickens is that it’s difficult to find veterinarians who are willing to care for these birds, even in a state like Maine, where my wife Liz and I live with our tiny flock of two Rhode Island Reds.

I was reminded of this recently when Nellie and Hope, our hens, required care that was beyond our homegrown expertise. Fortunately, we have access to a diverse rural veterinary practice that treats both large and small animals, including chickens.

We’re very grateful for this facility, but there is a downside. It’s 18 miles from home. That’s nowhere near as convenient as the much shorter trips we make when our cats and dogs need professional help. Yet there are no vets closer to home who work with chickens.

So what accounts for this dearth of poultry-friendly vets?

For one thing, chickens are nowhere near as popular among pet lovers as other animals are. Precise figures are hard to come by, but the Los Angeles Times reported last year that fewer than 2 percent of American households raise chickens. That number is expected to rise, but chickens won’t jump to the top of the pecking order anytime soon. About 44% of all American households have a dog, and 35% have a cat, according to the American Pet Products Association. 

And although I can’t prove it, I suspect that a significant number of chicken owners never seek veterinary care for their birds. (This is what I think of as "hey, they're only chickens" syndrome.) So if the demand for such care is not all that high, simple economics would dictate that the supply will be limited. As a veterinary technician told us during our recent visit, the chicken is one critter that would-be vet techs don’t have to bone up on during their training.

“This is a learning experience for me,” the tech said as we waited for the veterinarian. On average, she said, this particular animal hospital sees only one chicken per week. So as much as it may ruffle the feathers of some poultry fans, when it comes to veterinary priorities, the furry set still has the upper paw. And no amount of clucking is going to change that.

Hen Chronicles: There certainly was a lot of blood

Normally, putting the hens to bed for the night is a tranquil, pleasant routine. By the time I get out to the coop, Nellie and Hope are up on the roost, so all I have to do is lock them in, to protect them from predators.

Normally. 

The scene that greeted me last night was anything but normal. Nellie was standing on the coop floor, sounding upset. Her left foot was bleeding. The roost was streaked with blood. Good-sized patches of the coop's  bedding were "painted" a bright red. Racing back to the house, I filled Liz in. Once we got to the coop, we removed Nellie so Liz could examine her while I held her.

At first, it seemed as though Nellie had at least two open wounds, but on closer examination, it became clear that she had broken one toenail. What was left of the nail was bleeding profusely, but once Liz identified the source she applied cornstarch, which acts as a coagulant.

Initially, the cornstarch seemed to have no effect. It took a lot of patience, a lot of time and a lot of cornstarch to stanch the bleeding, but it finally slowed, and eventually stopped. We thought of isolating Nellie in a separate enclosure overnight, but chickens are social animals and we only have the two Rhode Island Red hens right now. Each would be agitated if separated from the other. So I removed and replaced the bloody pine shavings and washed the blood from the roost. We carefully placed Nellie on the roost beside Hope. We were not at all sure what we would find in the morning. Would the wound reopen? Would Nellie lose even more blood than she had already? I tried not to imagine the worst-case scenario.

The hens were not up and waiting at the window when I went out to feed them at dawn. That was very unusual. But when I placed food and water in the pen, I heard one hen, and then the other one, jump down from the roost to the floor.

As always, Nellie was the first to emerge from the coop when I opened the door. She wasn’t bleeding, although she had bled a bit during the night, leaving a sizable red spot in the bedding beneath the perch. She walked slowly at first, and her comb was paler than normal. But she did not limp, and she began eating fairly quickly. She even laid a larger-than-normal egg later in the morning. It seemed the crisis had passed.

Readers who do not own chickens as pets may shake their heads and mumble. “Geez, it’s only a chicken, for crying out loud.” But when a pet is hurt or sick, does the species really matter? If a child’s guinea pig and an adult’s champion Springer Spaniel are wounded, is the child any less fretful than the adult, simply because her pet is such a "humble" creature? 

Hen Chronicles: Rest in peace, Snowy (11.19.17)

Our Plymouth Rock hen, Snow, had to be euthanized last Sunday. She was old, for a chicken, and her health went from bad to worse over a span of two weeks or so. By Nov. 18, she had stopped eating. Even her beloved snacks, such as mealworm and plain yogurt, held no appeal. That pattern continued the following day, combined with several other signs that her quality of life was gone.

Snow (aka, Snowy) was a cherished pet. She was our oldest hen, the one we had for the longest period of time, the last survivor from our 2012 start-up flock, the chicken with the biggest, boldest, most flamboyant personality. She had suffered several mishaps and medical emergencies over the years, but we had always managed to nurse her back to health.

Until age created an insurmountable obstacle.

There was no way I could have personally ended Snow's life. Yet Liz and I cannot stand to see animals suffer, so we knew that we should act quickly. Nov. 19 being a Sunday, the only available veterinary clinic was an emergency animal hospital 30 miles away. So we placed Snow atop a soft towel in a cat carrier, and I hit the road.

The wait for a veterinary technician wasn't long, but what happened after Snow received her injection seemed interminable.

The only other time I had seen a hen euthanized was at another clinic. The injection took effect almost instantaneously in that case, but the emergency clinic uses a different, and slower, method. I agreed to hold Snow as she “went to sleep,” as the tech put it. So there I sat, alone with Snow in the examining room, waiting for the end. I cradled Snow in my arms for more than 20 minutes, watching her fade ever so slowly. She was wrapped in a fluffy purple blanket provided by the staff. I stroked her neck the entire time, kissed her head, and told her that I loved her and that her ordeal would soon be over. Her eyes remained open until shortly before she passed away. She made no sound. She did not fidget.

Although I didn’t expect Snow’s passing would take as long as it did, knowing that in advance would not have changed anything. I would not have left her alone to die with strangers. Holding her and trying to comfort her (she always liked being held and was responsive to the human voice) was extraordinarily difficult, under the circumstances. But I know with absolute certainty that it was the right thing to do. When a staffer finally verified that Snow was gone, she must have seen that I was distraught because she hugged me and said I had done well.

You don’t have to be Jane Goodall working with chimpanzees to appreciate that animals are individuals, with cognitive abilities, personalities, quirks and emotions. Yes, Snowy was a chicken, but I would never say she was “just a chicken.” The pejorative term “birdbrain,” assuming as it does that birds as a class of animals are rather stupid, is foolish and inaccurate.

Snow was a force of nature, full of life and intelligence and exuberance. She always laid unusually large eggs (which sometimes caused physical problems for her), rarely stopped talking while she was awake, and sat at the top of the flock's pecking order for most of her time with us. Yet she didn't pick on newcomers, or harass other hens when they were molting. She had joie de vivre, pure and simple, and a certain dignity.

Caring for Snow all these years was a joy; being with her to the end, a responsibility. I have no adequate words to describe the void she has left behind, or the gratitude we feel for having shared her life.

Snow (aka, Snowy) in her prime.

Hen Chronicles: No, it's not time to say goodbye just yet

I thought she was a goner.

When I headed out to the veterinarian’s office with Snow, our Plymouth Rock, late yesterday afternoon, I feared her number was up. Snow is at least six years old, possibly older, and although she just completed a molt that left her with a whole new set of sparkling white feathers, her behavior has been off for more than a week.

Snow has been eating, and she still comes running at snack time, but otherwise, she isn’t moving around very much. In fact, she spends much of her day in a hunched pose, with her tail down and her head and neck tucked into her body.

She gets in and out of the coop. But unlike Nellie and Hope, Snow can’t hop up onto the roost at night anymore. Instead, she parks herself in one of the nest boxes on the floor of the coop, waiting quietly until Liz and I head out there in the early evening and place her on the roost. She eagerly grabs hold of it with both feet and a brief flapping of wings.

So Liz and I were apprehensive yesterday when we tucked Snow into a cat carrier for the 25-minute trip to the vet’s. It was dark by the I time I headed down the driveway. Snow was quiet and still during the drive, possibly having fallen asleep.

The other folks waiting their turn at the clinic had a more standard array of pets: a beautiful, all-black pit bull, a yellow lab, a tiny dog of some breed I could not identify. The people who walked in after I had arrived peered into the cat carrier, as pet owners often do in such places.

“A chicken?” one dog owner asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “Do you have chickens?”

“I do,” she said, a bemused note in her voice. “But I’ve never seen one in the waiting room before.”

I rarely take any of our chickens to the vet; yesterday’s visit marked only the third such trip (and the second for Snow) in five years. It’s difficult to even find a vet who treats chickens, so I always assumed that seeking professional help for our hens made me something of an odd duck, so to speak. But chickens are popular pets these days, and the receptionist said Snow was the second chicken to visit yesterday. It turns out the clinic, which is located in a rural area in central Maine and cares for both large and small animals, typically sees two or three chickens every week.

I held my breath when the veterinarian entered the examining room, but the news turned out to be surprisingly good. Snow’s temperature and heart rate were normal, her lungs were clear, her plumage was magnificent, her feet healthy. Her crop was full, confirming that she had eaten her fill. She’s lost some muscle mass, the vet said, and she may have a touch of arthritis. Bottom line? She’s old. I had been under the impression that chickens typically live about 10 years, but the vet, an experienced hand and a chicken owner himself, said seven to eight years is the norm.

“So you don’t think she should be euthanized."

"Oh no,” he said.

Once we were back home, Liz and I repeated what has become the new normal. I lifted the hinged roof of the coop and Liz held Snow over the roost until the old girl dropped her landing gear and wrapped her dinosaur-like toes around the horizontal post. She settled in for the night. Between Nellie and Hope. Where she belongs.

Nellie, Hope and Snow in June 2014.

Hen Chronicles: A hen's stupendous spur spurs us to act

Hope's spur

There are many things I never knew about chickens until we acquired hens of our own. The existence of spurs was one of them.

A chicken’s spur is aptly named. It’s a pointed growth that usually extends at a right angle from the back of the leg, sometimes with a slight bend upward. They’re more common in roosters than in hens, but hens can develop them as well.

“Most hens have little rudimentary knobs instead of spurs, although some have real spurs that can grow quite long,” Gail Damerow writes in The Chicken Encyclopedia. Quite long indeed.

The photo above shows the left leg of Hope, a Rhode Island Red and one of our three hens. The horizontal projection at the lower right is her back toe. The growth above that is a spur which, as you can see, curves up and forward. The photo is a bit misleading because the tip of the spur is not as close to the leg as it appears to be here, and the tip actually seems to be a bit to the right of the leg. Still, the spur is long, and we fear it could eventually damage or even puncture the leg, because of this basic fact about spurs: they keep growing.

We don’t have roosters, and Hope is the only hen we’ve owned who has developed a spur, so we have no prior experience with them. As the spur continued to develop, we decided it was time to intervene. But what to do? Remove it? Trim it? We’ve had to cut our hens’ toenails several times over the years, but this seemed more . . . daunting. A spur is large. It's thick. And it's full of blood. Caution is called for.

There aren’t very many veterinarians in Maine who treat chickens. I found one 20 miles away who agreed to take a look at Hope, possibly with the goal of removing the spur, but she admitted by e-mail that she doesn’t have a lot of experience working with chickens.

As we weighed the possibility of hitting the interstate with Hope on board, a bit of online research revealed that it’s possible to file a spur, at least enough to blunt the tip. So yesterday, we decided to give that a go. While I held Hope, Liz began scraping away with a newly purchased six-inch Stanley file. Hope squawked, but from aggravation, not pain. Liz didn’t get down to the quick, so there was no bleeding. And the tip of the spur is now a bit more blunt than it was before. "It's hard, very hard," Liz said of the spur, "more like a horn than a nail."

We’ll follow up with more filing in the days ahead, and we haven’t ruled out taking Hope to the vet if necessary. But we’re hoping this may shorten and flatten the spur enough to get the job done without a stressful and unpleasant road trip whose outcome would be uncertain. All of which leaves me wondering what surprises "the girls" will spring on us next.

Hen Chronicles: Our accident-prone hen does it again

Snow, our all-white Plymouth Rock, is the oldest hen in our tiny flock, and the only surviving member of the trio we bought almost five years ago. She’s also the flock’s “problem child,” the hen who has a penchant for suffering mishaps that — so far, at least — Rhode Island Reds Nellie and Hope have managed to avoid.
 
In no way does Snow resemble a cat, except that she too may have nine lives. Over the years, she has required human intervention (don’t ask) at least twice to help her lay eggs that were stuck. She has managed to cut off part of her comb. Last year, she even expelled tissue while laying an egg. (Liz had to push it back in before I took her to the vet, who prescribed temporary isolation, dark surroundings to discourage laying and periodic applications of Preparation H to her nether regions.)

Yesterday, on one of the coldest days of the year, when high winds combined with low temperatures to make for truly unpleasant conditions, Snow broke the nail on the rear toe of her right food. At mid-afternoon snack time, Liz found blood in the pen, dry blood smeared on Snow’s toes and tummy and blood dripping from what was left of the damaged toenail.

We keep cornstarch on hand to stanch the bleeding in such situations, but we don’t have a walk-in coop and it was too cold and windy outside to treat the toe there. So Liz hauled Snow off to the garage and handed her over to me. While I held Snow against my chest, Liz wiped off the bleeding stub and repeatedly applied cornstarch to it over the course of several minutes, until the bleeding finally stopped.

Healthy chickens may harass wounded flock mates, which is why we isolated Snow following some of her previous misadventures. But all of them occurred during the warmer months. We don’t have the best setup for isolating a chicken in the winter, so we reunited Snow with Nellie and Hope, repeated the cornstarch treatment a couple of hours later, and hoped for the best overnight.

Snow was a bit slow getting up at dawn today, but she dug into her breakfast when I released the hens into the pen at 6:30 a.m. There was no sign of any fresh blood in the coop or on the toe, and Nellie and Hope ignored her, which was for the best.

Sometimes, animals know when we are trying to help them. I think that was the case yesterday afternoon when I held Snowy while Liz ministered to her. Snow was bright-eyed and alert but completely tranquil. She clucked occasionally in a soft, seemingly contented voice. Perhaps it signaled gratitude.

Hen Chronicles: Ah, the things we do for "the girls"

Liz and I headed to the garage at daybreak today for various supplies, and then out to the coop at the back end of our lot.

I make this trip every morning at dawn, to release “the girls” into the pen, feed and water them, and remove the night’s deposits from the coop. But Liz joined me this morning because we had an added task to perform, a two-person job that requires someone to hold a hen and someone else to do the work.

Hope, one of our Rhode Island Reds, needed to have her nails clipped.

Our three hens generally do a good job of trimming their nails as they scratch and peck for goodies, but every once in a while, things get out of control. In Hope’s case, she had one nail, in particular, that had grown so long it was curling down and under, like a bent finger. This didn’t impede her mobility, but I worried that she might break the nail one morning while hopping down from the roost, which would, presumably, be painful — or worse. Hope has been molting, and it’s unwise to pick up a chicken while delicate new feathers are emerging, so even though we noticed the overgrown nail some time ago, we ended up waiting until this morning to tackle the toes.

Thanks to the design of our small coop and pen, which are not walk-in sized, it’s not all that easy to retrieve our hens. Even if we try to entice them to come out into the yard, they often refuse to do so. And Hope is the worst of the lot in that department because she’s especially shy and reticent.

The easiest way to remove the hens is to lock them in the coop. While one of us lifts the hinged roof and holds it up, the other person reaches in and grabs the targeted hen. Hope almost always is the last hen to get up in the morning, which is why we launched our mission at dawn. When I opened the coop door, Snow and Nellie dutifully trooped out into the pen. I then latched the door to keep Hope in the coop, and pulled the roof open. That allowed Liz to lift a squawking, flapping, highly insulted Hope from the roost.

Liz does the actual trimming, so once she had Hope in hand, we moved away from the coop and I took Hope from her. Grabbing her trusty pet nail clippers (yes, the hens have their own set stored in the garage), Liz worked her magic in no time at all. We had corn starch on hand to stanch any bleeding, but Liz is very careful, and no blood was shed. Within a couple of minutes, Hope had joined the agitated Snow and Nellie in the pen, and all three hens settled in for breakfast.

Teamwork. In chicken keeping, as in life, it often makes more sense than the alternative.

Hen Chronicles: Our Plymouth Rock has a day of reckoning

Snow, our all-white Plymouth Rock hen, seems indifferent to the fact that she dirties her bum every few months. It may not bother her, but it certainly displeases us. Let's just say it's not a good look for her.

Her latest appointment with a sudsy bath came on Wednesday, when Liz eased her into a plastic tub full of warm water and dishwashing liquid and worked her gloved hands over Snow's nether regions, to clean the feathers. Liz then moved Snow into a rinsing tub, after which we wiped her down with some clean rags, and even used a hair dryer to speed things up a bit.

Snow tolerates all of this remarkably well. We don't fully submerge her in water; once she's sitting in the tub, the water rises about halfway up her sides. She usually settles right in for the duration, with no fidgeting or squawking, although on Wednesday she bolted from the wash tub and made a run for it, heading for the coop several yards away. Liz outpaced her, though, and plopped her back into her bath.

"It is pretty funny seeing a wet, soapy chicken running down the path" that leads to the coop, Liz said later.

Even after we dry her off as best we can, the freshly washed Snow always looks wet and bedraggled. It takes a while for those fanny feathers to completely dry off. But Wednesday was a warm, breezy day, and long before our three hens called it a night, Snow's feathery backside -- known in chicken lingo as a hen's "fluff" because the feathers back there are small, numerous and fluffy -- was its normal downy self.

We've rarely had to clean up any of our other hens over the years; they normally do a pretty good job of that themselves. But then, Snow is the only white hen we've ever had. Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, may get somewhat dirty as well from time to time, but perhaps their coloring does a better job of concealing it.

Snow is our oldest, toughest, loudest, bossiest, hungriest hen. She lays the largest eggs. She has the biggest personality. She experiences the most adventures. Most Likely to Need a Bath seems like just another fitting title.

Rub a dub dub, a chicken in a tub

Hen Chronicles: Finally, Snow flies her flag at full staff

On the face of it, the photo below shows nothing out of the ordinary. Our feisty Plymouth Rock, Snow, is in the foreground, backed by Rhode Island Reds Nellie and Hope. To Liz and me, though, this seemingly ordinary image is anything but. In fact, it's an especially welcome sight.

I’ve mentioned in this space before that Snow suffered a prolapsed oviduct back in May. More commonly (and crudely) known as a blowout, this occurs when the egg-laying process goes awry and some chicken innards are ejected with the egg. In Snow’s case, we managed to gently push the exposed tissue back in before I took Snow to a veterinarian, who recommended a course of treatment that lasted several days.

As you can see from this photo, which I took Friday morning, Snow (aka “the miracle hen”) survived her ordeal. In fact, she’s laying quite regularly again, so far without any problems. But until a few days ago, her tail seemed to signal that something was still amiss.

I never really paid too much attention to the hens’ tails before Snow had her mishap. But during her recovery, I began to notice that she was holding hers differently than the other hens did theirs. Wakeful chickens normally keep their tails in a horizontal position, or elevated. Snow had a drooping tail. Although she was behaving normally in other respects, her tail hung down, fully covering her bum as she made her rounds in the pen.

After several weeks of this, she finally began elevating her tail, occasionally at first, then more regularly, until the “new” posture, which really marked the return of her old posture, became constant.

I suppose Snow might have injured her tail in connection with her ordeal, but I have a different theory. I don’t think it’s anthropomorphizing to suggest that, for quite a while after the blowout, Snow continued to feel some pain or discomfort or tenderness near her vent (chicken lingo for anus), so she covered it with her tail because she felt vulnerable there.

Animals are adept at hiding sickness and injuries. But sometimes, despite their best efforts at concealment, instinct betrays them, and reveals the truth.

Hen Chronicles: A work stoppage, then a return to normalcy

Maybe I should give up trying to understand chickens. You know, just go with the flow, as we used to say, and abandon any hope of comprehension.

Let’s start with our Plymouth Rock, Snow. We were under veterinarian’s orders a while back to reduce her exposure to sunlight for several days, to discourage her from laying eggs after she suffered what is commonly called a “blowout.” Properly known as a prolapsed oviduct, this occurs when part of the oviduct, the channel in a hen's body through which an egg passes en route to the exit, is partially “blown out” with an egg. That happened to Snow on May 17, and after the ejected tissue was pushed back in (yes, really), Snow had to recover in semi-dark isolation for a few days.

Snow was reunited with Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, on May 21. But she did not resume laying. One day passed. Then two. Three. Then four. May 26th rolled around. Still no eggs.

Snow is old enough to retire, and we started to think she had entered "henopause." A full week after she rejoined the rest of the flock, she had yet to lay. May 29th came and went without an egg. May 30th too. To make matters worse, as Snow’s hiatus dragged on, Nellie and Hope slowed down. Then they stopped laying. Not for as long a period as Snow, but for several consecutive days.

Finally, on May 31st, when we expected Snow’s membership in the AARP (American Association of Retired Poultry) to officially kick in, she showed us that she hasn’t called it quits just yet.

Snow laid an egg.

On June 1, Liz gave the other hens a talking to about the importance of getting back to work. The day after that, Nellie and Hope were back in the game. On June 2, all three hens laid eggs, followed on June 3 by an egg from one of the Reds, and another the next day.

Hens can stop laying for all sorts of reasons, including anxiety and extreme weather. We’re not at all sure what happened in this case. Presumably, Snow’s recovery took quite some time. But why did Nellie and Hope join in? They had no injuries and showed no signs of being sick. Was it a sisterly show of solidarity? A work stoppage to protest unspecified grievances? Maybe they were egg-bound? Stressed out by the sound of a neighbor’s chainsaw when he cut down some trees near the coop? Adversely affected by a couple of unusually hot days?

Chickens do a lot of talking. I understand some of what they have to say ("where the hell is our snack?" and "the sky is falling") but they haven’t really explained their recent behavior. Perhaps the answer will turn up in their memoirs. The English translation, of course.

Hen Chronicles: The three musketeers, together again

Anyone who read my previous post a few days ago may remember that Snow, our Plymouth Rock, had a brush with death last week when she ejected part of her innards while laying an egg.

In the end, Liz and I had better luck with Snow than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men did with Humpty Dumpty, but for several hours on Tuesday, Snow's prospects did not look good. We put her back together as best we could that morning and I took her to the vet’s office that afternoon. That’s where I learned that Snow would have to be placed in isolation, with reduced exposure to daylight, for three or fours days while we applied Preparation H to her vent (aka, bum) twice daily. Yes, Preparation H.

Fortunately, Snow gradually improved as the week progressed. By Saturday morning, two things had become obvious. Snow was fed up with our focus on her nether regions. And she obviously missed coopmates Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds. She seemed to be sufficiently recovered to move back in with her buds, so Liz carried her to the coop for what proved to be a happy reunion. There was much “great to see you” clucking.

The good news is that the three musketeers have been reunited, and all of them are thrilled. Chickens are social animals, after all, and these three have been together for three years now. And the bad news? We're keeping our fingers crossed. The vet warned me that, the precedent having been set, Snow could develop a prolapsed oviduct all over again.

And to think some people claim keeping chickens couldn’t be easier.

Top to bottom: Nellie, Hope and Snow, awaiting snacks on Saturday afternoon.

Hen Chronicles: Now we’re calling her “the miracle chicken”

Apparently, cats are not the only creatures that have nine lives. Our Plymouth Rock, Snow, has now worked her way through several of her own.

The oldest, most assertive member of our three-hen flock, Snow has become egg-bound at least twice since we bought her in 2012. This is a condition in which a hen has an egg that she's unable to lay. I won’t go into the details here, but my wife Liz and I helped her through those crises.

Two years ago, Snow somehow managed to slice off part of her comb (the red appendage atop a chicken’s head). By the time I discovered this accident, there was blood everywhere. A frantic call to a vet, the application of corn starch to stanch the bleeding, isolation for close to two weeks and regular applications of Veterycin as a healing agent saw Snow through that one.

Which brings us to this week.

To make a long story at least a bit shorter, Snow was lethargic on Sunday, more withdrawn on Monday and nearly comatose on Tuesday morning. By then, her vent (aka, bum) was caked and dirty, so we gave her a bath and dried her off. That's when we noticed that she appeared to have a prolapsed oviduct, which occurs when part of the oviduct is pushed out through the vent. (Innards become outards.) So Liz lubricated a gloved hand and gently pushed the exposed tissue back in. We were winging it (so to speak), because we’d never dealt with a prolapsed oviduct before. Nor, for that matter, were we even sure about our diagnosis.

We then separated Snow from Nellie and Hope by placing her in isolation in a small pen. Once inside, she stood in the same spot without moving, eating or drinking for a full five hours, with her head tucked into her body.

Liz and I were heartbroken. Snow is the only surviving hen from the trio we bought in 2012.  We’ve had her for more than four years, and now we were convinced that she was a goner. When Liz picked her up at one point, Snow simply lay in her arms without moving. Then she closed her eyes.

We needed professional help, especially if Snow had to be euthanized, which I had no intention of doing myself. So I made a late-afternoon appointment with the only veterinary clinic in these parts that treats chickens.

Then, Snow’s luck began to change. Early Tuesday afternoon, hours before her appointment, she finally moved into a crate in the isolation pen and laid an egg. She revived a bit after that, and looked more alive than dead by the time we reached the vet’s office at 4 p.m.

Despite her age, Snow remains a prodigious layer of unusually large eggs. And therein lies her problem. By doing what she does best, what laying hens are supposed to do, she had injured herself. The vet confirmed that our amateur diagnosis of a prolapsed oviduct was correct, and that we had handled it properly. But there was more to be done. Although the oviduct was back in place (inside rather than outside), the vent was swollen and distended.

So now we’re under doctor’s orders to keep Snow isolated while she heals and to reduce her exposure to daylight during that time, which should temporarily discourage egg production. Oh, and one more thing. For the next few days, we have to treat her vent twice a day with a product I would never, ever have associated with keeping chickens: Preparation H.

Really. No joke. But hey, if that's what it takes to nurse Snow back to health, we’re more than willing to do what has to be done. After all, she was talking and eating and moving about somewhat yesterday. And we've already discovered that, when it comes to giving her a dab of you know what on her you know where, she's a very good patient.

Snow in the ICU (aka, her isolation pen in the garage) Wednesday afternoon. If I had taken a picture of her Tuesday morning and posted it beside this one, you wouldn't believe it was the same hen.

Hen Chronicles: It's time for a bath (no water required)

We’ve had our share of warm weather here in central Maine this winter, not to mention relatively little snow, all of which makes for happy chickens. Now our three hens are providing still more evidence that this has not been the winter of their discontent.

The outdoor "dust bath" is back.

One day last week, and again yesterday, Snow, Nellie and Hope dug shallow pits in the soil of their pen, plopped themselves down in them, and then thrashed around for a good long while, using their feet and wings to toss sand and dirt into the air and all over their bodies.

To the uninitiated, it might have looked as if they were having seizures. In fact, this is a popular, and healthy, pastime that we see on a regular basis during the summer, but rarely at this time of the year.

In The Chicken Encyclopedia, expert Gail Damerow writes that chickens “work dust through their feathers” during this process, to control parasites. “When a chicken is done dusting, it typically stands up and shakes itself off, then preens.”

Last February, “the girls” used the pine shavings in their coop as a substitute for the traditional outdoor dust bath, because the ground in the pen remained too frozen for them to “bathe” in it. 

Not so, this year.

Dust-bathing chickens “seem very happy when doing this,” note the authors of Keeping Chickens For Dummies, “so it must feel good.”

Happy indeed. A blissful chicken flopping around in loose dirt, seemingly oblivious to its surroundings, looks about as content as a pig in . . . . Well, you know.