Chicken Drama

Well, the chickens aren't doing very well.  We hope that we've turned a corner, though.

We lost another chicken Sunday morning.  On the way home from church, I stopped at Tractor Supply and talked to someone about getting medicine for the chickens.  An employee kept saying, "We're not vets, but..." and recommended antibiotics that go in their water.  She also said, cheerfully, that "chickens get sick so easily and you should always give them antibiotics when you acquire them." 

  We read up on chickens some before we got our first batch, and I knew chickens can get sick.  But our first 2 batches were very healthy, so this is all new and  discouraging.

  As of this moment, we don't seem to have lost another though I've not checked the coop yet.  We are HOPEFUL that most who were sick have gotten better.  Now that we know we have an illness, we can see they weren't doing well last week.  A healthy chicken struts around and pecks and scratches the ground with her feet.  Last week, all the chickens looked strangely immoble and sluggish. They spent a lot of time just standing still.  Now most of them are looking lively, though a couple are obviously sick and one was (as of yesterday) apparently on death's door.

One aspect of the illness is that the really sick ones don't open their eyes. We don't know if it is photophobia or if their eyes are gunky. Probably the latter. Yesterday, our older 3 children worked on gently wiping the eyes of a couple of birds to try to help them open their eyes.

This is the sickest of them all.  We of course were cautious about washing hands carefully afterwards though I don't think people can usually get bird illnesses.

One last highly discouraging thing is that the chickens aren't laying. We've not gotten an egg in 2 days.  That is strange because most of them are looking quite lively.  Perhaps they are still recuperating their strength after being sick.

So...we'll see what happens.  In the large, grand, scheme of things, this isn't that huge but it is not what we hoped for when we got our new, handsome flock of chickens.