Despite being only thirty miles from Boston, my town of Carlisle is small – only 5,000 human residents. One reason for the low housing density is that much of the area is not suitable for building. It’s too wet. Bordering Carlisle is a river that floods into woodlands. It’s a national wildlife refuge and an important flyway. Throughout Carlisle there are intermittent streams and vernal pools, essential habitat for amphibians, including several rare species. Although humans are restricted in building here, there are some who can construct their homes wherever they like – beavers are master builders, and ducks and herons have a way with sticks.

All this winter the wetlands have been frozen over and blanketed in snow. (In the springtime there are shallow ponds on both sides of this road.)

 

The wetlands remain frozen over, but the last few days saw a dramatic upswing in temperature. It’s above freezing! The spring thaw and mud season have begun. Driving down the aptly named Brook Street, right at the low spot that crosses wetlands, I kept my truck to the center of the road, away from the water-filled shoulders. It’s a good thing that I was driving carefully, because there was a creature up ahead.

I stopped and got out to see what it was. (Which explains the not so great photos taken with my phone’s camera.)

 

A muskrat! On a springtime mission from someplace to somewhere.

 

The water was running fast down hill. She was going against the current. Did she think that she was heading upstream in order to find the calm water of a pond? On one side of her was the road, on the other a snow bank impossible to climb up and over. Her instinct told her to move up the stream until she found safety.

I could see her webbed feet and the whiskers on her nose. I didn’t want to get too close as she was already worried. (For better photos and more about this animal, go to this website.)

 

Two cars stopped behind mine. This is the sort of traffic jam that we have in Carlisle. Then we all slowly drove past the muskrat. About a hundred feet further up the road was a break in the snowbank and a way for her to get back into the real wetlands. I’m sure that she got home.

This past week, Opal provided me with a the opportunity to show you how I go about diagnosing and treating a health issue in an older hen. On Thursday, after Steve closed up the hens for the night, he told me that Opal was making an odd noise. I went out to see.

AWWWK! …several seconds of silence…. AWWWK!… repeat….

This was a hen in some sort of distress. Her eyes were clear and there was no sound of gurgling breathing, so I didn’t think that it was a respiratory problem. The hens were getting onto their roosts. Everyone was ignoring Opal. I decided to wait until the morning and see what developed.

In the morning, all was quiet and Opal looked and sounded okay. But, that afternoon, Opal was in a nesting box and her head was splattered with blood. Chickens know when a hen isn’t well, and they’ll often take advantage of the situation, pecking to keep the hen away from resources like food or a favored nesting box.

Opal needed to be cleaned up, checked over and observed for awhile. Most people’s first inclination, when faced with a possibly sick hen, is to bring her inside and baby her. This is not usually a good idea. First of all, chickens shed dirt and dander, and their manure breaks down into ammonia fumes. This is not something that you want in your house. Secondly, chickens have small and not particularly robust lungs. Fresh air is best for them. Thirdly, removing a chicken from the group is stressful for her, and if kept away for more than a day, you’ll have difficulty reintegrating the hen back into the flock. However, it was 10° F outside. I brought her into the house.

I looked Opal over, with her breeding and history in mind. She is a Delaware, which is a breed developed in the 1940s for meat, so she’s a big bird, and not one that was ever meant to live past her first year. Delawares are good layers, though, and gentle hens, and so are a nice addition to a backyard flock. Opal is turning four, which is well past her prime. She has had laying issues – she has infectious bronchitis, which causes thin-shelled, wrinkly eggs. This winter I’ve noticed that her bottom is dirtier than usual – in these cold temperatures diarrhea freezes on the hen before she can tidy herself up. Something was amiss. But, since she was eating and behaving normally, I’d let her be.

Now, with her odd vocalizations and the blood on her head, it was time for an epsom salt soak, which I call the Spa Treatment.

 

It took a bit to figure out where the blood was coming from. I gently cleaned it off with a warm, wet wash cloth.

 

Someone must have grabbed her comb and yanked, as the base of it had detached from her head. It was already healing back in place. Chickens have a remarkable ability to recover from wounds.

Opal’s bottom needed a soaking and rinsing. As with most hens who have had a runny discharge for awhile, the area was bare of feathers. However, it was otherwise fine with smooth pink skin and no signs of external parasites.

Her vent (that’s the opening that both the egg and the manure comes out of) was soft and wide, indications that she is in lay. But, I haven’t collected any eggs from her this season, which is cause for concern. Is she an internal layer? (That is when eggs, not yet fully formed, slip out of the reproductive tract and accumulate in the body cavity.) Her vent was pulsing – a sure sign of internal distress. I don’t jump to the conclusion that there is a stuck egg because I haven’t found egg binding to be prevalent. I’ve done 21 necropsies and have only found one true case. Rather, these symptoms of straining and diarrhea, when they progress to death, are more often caused by cancer or internal laying. There’s no way of knowing which disease she has until the bird dies and a necropsy is done. But, honestly, it doesn’t matter to the hen or to the caregiver – there’s no cure.

However, and this is the big however, sometimes a hen shows distress and if you can move things along inside of her, and right any metabolic imbalances, then the hen can recover. The first thing to do is that 

soak. This is not the first time that I’ve had to do this for Opal. Back in August, we did this same routine. And she recovered.

There are signs for optimism again. Opal wasn’t in a hunched, miserable-looking penguin stance. She’s remained upright.

 

After her bath, I blow dried her and put her into a dog crate in the mudroom in order to observe how much she ate and drank, and what came out her vent.

 

She had no lack of appetite, a very good sign. No lethargy. The crucial tell would be what she passed.

That wasn’t so good. Diarrhea.

 

On the plus side, it wasn’t green or yellow (indications of severe ailments without a cure.) Over the course of 8 hours, she did a normal poo.

 

But then it went back to the diarrhea.

At this point I evaluated the situation. Something was wrong inside of Opal – ongoing diarrhea pointed to that. However, she was no longer squawking in distress. She was eating and drinking and walking normally. Her comb was healing and there was no obvious bloody spot for the hens to attack. It was time to put Opal back in with her flock.

Two days later, her bottom remains free of manure. The Gems are leaving her comb alone.

 

Opal would like to lay an egg.

 

Honestly, I’m not optimistic about her long-term chances. She has issues. At this point, though, a little TLC gets her through. It’s important that any treatment is brief and gets her right back in with the flock. If Opal stops eating and strutting around and interacting with the flock, then I’ll know that her time is up. For now, though, she’s a big hen with a very clean and fluffy white bottom.

Bird flu. We knew that it’d get here eventually, and after years of watching and testing, and feeling relief that it wasn’t yet on this continent, we’re now seeing cases in the Northwest.

There are many iterations of bird flu (also known as avian Influenza or AI). They’re all highly infectious viral diseases, which means that they spread rapidly from bird to bird. Bird flu is most often spread from migratory wildfowl to domestic flocks, but can also travel via manure on boots and in car treads. Chickens exposed to avian influenza suffer from respiratory disease. Some AI is low pathogenic, which means that exposed birds get mildly sick, and perhaps have a reduction in productivity. Some AI strains are highly pathogenic, which means that the birds rapidly become ill and mortality is high. Currently, the two strains that have appeared in North America are H5N2 and H5N8. H5N2 and H5N8 do not cause disease in humans, however, they can wreck devastation on a farm.

Most avian viruses don’t infect people, and that’s true for AI, too. Of all of the avian influenza viruses, only two are known to infect and sicken humans. These are the ones that you hear the most about in the news because they have caused several hundred human deaths. Look closely at these cases, and you find that the stricken people were often exposed to large quantities of diseased dead birds in unsanitary live poultry markets, or they were collecting feathers from dead wildfowl. There has been no human-to-human transmission. Nor is there a risk when eating properly cooked eggs and meat.

The poultry industry is rightly worried about this virus spreading. They have a lot of animals at stake. Some barns house 50,000 hens, and exposure to the virus means that all of the birds have to be culled and the farm quarantined. The industry would like to use AI as an excuse to control and restrict backyard chicken flocks, using the argument that infection will spread from a free-ranging flock to their businesses. I don’t believe that a hen on a suburban lot is a threat to them. It’s far more likely that a wild bird will be the vector. Also, there’s some research that the virus is more lethal in the conditions found in industrial agriculture. However, we must be prudent and responsible. If migratory wildfowl congregate on your property, keep you hens fenced away from where the geese and ducks roam. Don’t let your hens forage under wild bird feeders, or, better yet, don’t feed the wild birds. Do your best to keep sparrows and other birds out of your coops (don’t allow nesting in the eaves.) Practice good biosecurity. If you visit a friend’s flock, disinfect your shoes and wash your clothes when you come home. Have farm boots to lend out when people come to your backyard. Not all respiratory diseases seen in chickens are avian flu, but if you suddenly have several chickens die rapidly from breathing difficulties, (death happens 48 hours after the first symptoms are noticed) call your state agriculture department to find out about testing. It’s a horrible thought, but if you do have avian flu on your premises, you’ll need to cull your entire flock. This is important for your neighbor’s hens and for the health of wild birds. If you don’t, your chickens will be an on-going source of the disease and will spread it to wild birds (falcons and eagles have succumbed) as well as other flocks. Recently, even a zoo, who’s mission is to protect rare species, had to cull birds infected with AI.

Chickens, like the rest of us, are susceptible to, and get numerous ailments. We live in a world filled with pathogens. A hermetically-sealed chamber wouldn’t keep us safe, besides, that would be no way to live. Avian influenza is simply another health risk that we have to watch out for. Be prudent and use commonsense.

When your flock is new and young, they’re hard to catch. Even friendly hens dart out of the way of hands reaching down to grab them. Then, something changes, and you’ll see this:

 

The hen lowers herself towards the ground, flattens her back, and tucks in her head. She squats.

You’ll usually first notice this when the days lengthen in the springtime. It coincides with the laying season. Squatting is what a hen does when a rooster approaches her to mate. Does that mean that she thinks you’re going to mate with her? Who knows what goes on inside of a chicken’s head? But I don’t think so. I think that an ovulating hen is hard-wired to flatten herself and be immobile when a bigger being is looming over her.

Many people like to interpret behavior as either dominant or submissive, but I think that view of the world is restrictive and that you miss what’s really going on. Submissive implies that the hen is passive. A hen has a choice. A hen can avoid a rooster (or me) by running off, and some hens have no problem telling a rooster what’s what. Fertile hens are receptive to mating, and squatting is a way to communicate that. She is an active participant in the action, not simply a meek female. (This said, if the enclosure is too small, and there are too few hens per rooster, the dynamic changes to the detriment of the hens. Most backyard set-ups aren’t suitable for healthy behavior between roos and hens.)

As with all behavior, it’s complicated. Mating can be rough on a hen. The rooster can rake her back with his talons and rip feathers off of her neck with his beak, and so the squat is also a protective position – you’ll see it when an aggressive hen attacks another. The weaker hen will turn her back to the bully and squat. This shields her head and belly, and changes her center of gravity so that she stays upright.

Although it’s generally true that hens that squat are the best layers, that’s not always the case. Misty lays daily and yet you won’t catch that lean, fast Andalusian, squatting – if I loom over her, she speeds off.

Beatrix, though, is a mild-mannered Ameracauna. When I need a hen for a school visit, there she is, looking pretty and calm,

 

and when I reach over, she squats.

 

This is why Beatrix often gets to meet children, and Misty stays home.